[WEB4LIB] Web Navigation book

[thom]

On Tue, 27 Oct 1998, Roy Tennant wrote:

> At the risk of appearing to be a shil for O'Reilly & Associates, I must
> nonetheless urge all Web managers within the sound of my email to run out
> and buy "Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience" by Jennifer
> Fleming. I am reviewing it for Current Cites, and I think it's great. It's
> chock full of good information, advice, examples, diagrams, screen shots
> (both in full-color and black-and-white), and links. "Web Navigation"
> makes a great companion work to another book I've urged Web managers to
> buy recently, "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web" (also from
> O'Reilly).

A partial shil maybe. The big thing missing in the Web Navigation book is
absolutely nothing on evaluation. The book looks good but the 'e' thing is
real important other wise you have a great looking site which is still
difficult to use. I think the companion piece to the Web Navigation book
is Jarad Spool's book on Web Usability which is actually based on real
research and some of the findings are totally counter intuitive till you
think about them. He actually encourages information overload such as
found on CNN and edmunds as long as the areas are well categorized simply
because this prevents 'drill-down' ala old Lotus 123, screen to screen to
screen etc. 

I'd read Spool first and then Web Navigation. Interesting combination. 

Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide

If you're even thinking about designing a web site that people will use to
find information, this bookUs for you. Web Site Usability: A Designer's
Guide is a 150-page report based on data from our research. We conducted
more than 50 usability tests on nine different web sites. This book
describes how well (and poorly) some information-rich sites actually work
when people use them to find specific answers.
[ http://world.std.com/~uieweb/bookdesc.htm ]

--Thom

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