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Information Design

information architecture and design

information architecture and design

The Elements of User Experience

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

concise guide to navigational and usability theory

Usability has so far been dominated by the work of Jakob Nielsen – but now there are new voices emerging. John Lenker recently set out his ideas on what he calls ‘flowpaths’, and now here comes Jesse James Garrett with The Elements of User Experience, which is his pitch on the essence of navigational clarity in web design. First he argues the case for user-centred design. All sites must be organised to make it easy for visitors to find what they want. He has had a diagram on his web site for some time now illustrating the point.

The Elements of User Experience This book is an amplification of that basic concept. It’s an idea that the user experience is enacted at five levels. These correspond to the way in which a site is constructed: Surface – Skeletal – Structure – Scope – Strategy. They represent each part of our engagement in a web site – from the buttons we press, the way they are arranged, the design of pages, the links between them, and how all aspects of a site are co-ordinated to deliver its essential purpose. He is wise enough to realise that everything does not easily fit into such convenient categories, but he then explores each level in depth.

First comes the strategy document – a concise statement of the project’s objectives. He’s very keen on clarifying aims, drawing up specifications, and making content inventories. The idea of all this is to prevent ‘mission creep’.

Interestingly he doesn’t pad his argument out with lots of examples, but concentrates on explaining each level of his basic concepts in depth. He has an easy style, and he avoids jargon.

He’s very good on making subtle distinctions – between for instance information architecture and information design. And like many recent commentators, he argues the case for having multiple navigation systems. After all, why not give visitors to a site a variety of routes for getting from one place to another.

It’s at this point that the book becomes most interesting – when he looks at the details of information architecture and shows how they must be related to what appears on the page. There’s some excellent advice on using wireframes here for instance. These are the outline plans which show the underlying structure of a given page.

This is a clear and refreshingly concise account of planning, organising, and thinking through the design of a successful Web site. It’s a book which gives an overview of site-building concepts, and it will appeal to site designers as well as to project managers and usability consultants.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Jesse James Garrett, The Elements of User Experience, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2003, pp.189, ISBN: 0735712026


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Filed Under: Information Design Tagged With: Information design, Navigation, Usability, Web design

The Renaissance Computer

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

information architecture in early print technology

The Renaissance Computer is a collection of essays which seek to explore the similarities, connections, and lessons to be drawn from a comparison of the advent of digital technology with the age of print in the immediate post-Gutenberg period. In the 15th century the printing press was the ‘new technology’. The first ever information revolution began with the advent of the printed book, enabling Renaissance scholars to formulate new ways of organizing and disseminating knowledge.

The Renaissance ComputerThe basic argument is that the proliferation of printed texts was as revolutionary and presented similar problems of information architecture, storage, and retrieval as we feel we have now in our digital age. The earliest attempts at memory and storage systems were remarkably similar to the Windows operating system, though the fact that they were made physically manifest made them cumbersome and non-portable. Nevertheless, it would have been wonderful to visit Giulio Camillo’s memory theatre, where a visitor occupied the stage, and all the knowledge of mankind was stored on the tiered rows of what would normally be seats.

Editor Jonathan Sawday looks at precursors of the modern computer in the work of Milton, Hobbes, Pascal, Liebnitz, and Descartes. There’s a chapter on the role of illustrations in early modern books, another looks at the role of the index, title page, marginalia, and contents page as early examples of hypertext and navigation.

The authors also point to the amazing persistence of some outmoded technological forms:

Recent work on the circulation of manuscript collections of poetry in the seventeenth century…has demonstrated that this form of publication survived for two centuries after the invention of the printing press. The modern researcher who, seated in the rare book rooms of the Huntington Library or the British Library, laboriously copies out passages from an early printed book is participating in an ancient tradition.

There is a very interesting (and more readable) chapter on Thomas Heywood’s Gunaikeion (1624), an encyclopedia on women. The link with computers is no more than the suggestion that it’s a cut and paste composition, but the content sounds so interesting it made me feel I wanted to read a copy.

These chapters are scholarly academic conference papers – and the have both their strengths and weaknesses. Wide ranging and well informed, but often looking for connections where none exist or finding them to little purpose.

The idea of a Renaissance computer is only a catchy idea. These studies are of how information was organised in text form, how it was understood and retrieved, and how the Renaissance book tackled issues of information architecture which many people now think of as something new.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday (eds), The Renaissance Computer: knowledge technology in the first age of print, London: Routledge, 2000, pp.212, ISBN: 0415220645


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Filed Under: Information Design, Literary Studies, Media Tagged With: Computers, Cultural history, Information architecture, Information design, The Renaissance Computer

The Visual Display of Information

July 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

best-selling illustrated essays on presenting information

The Visual Display of Information is the earliest of the three books on information design which Edward Tufte has written, designed, and published himself. In it he develops his theory of “a language for discussing graphics and a practical theory of data graphics” The first chapter plots the rise of data maps, which he claims didn’t really develop properly until the late seventeenth century, and then took off in the nineteenth – from which he gives some very elegantly illustrated examples. The centrepiece of this section is Charles Joseph Minard’s time chart of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. This shows in a really interesting manner the devastating reduction in the size of the army plotted again geographic location and ambient temparature. It is a fascinating mixure of three levels of information rendered as a graphical image.

Graphical excellence is the well-designed presentation of interesting data – a matter of substance, of statistics, and of design.

The Visual Display of InformationI was surprised to find how his writing is even more compacted and elliptical than in a book such as Visual Explanations written nearly twenty years later. Here he writes of a map “achieving statistical graphicacy, even approaching the bivariate scatterplot”. You’ve got to be prepared to hack your way through a lot of this sort of thing.

In a discussion of the integrity of graphical data and statistics that lie he gives examples from Britain’s national debt during the war of American Independence – which show graphs going up whilst the truth goes down. This is very convincing – though I couldn’t easily get used to his habit of referring to ‘data’ in the plural.

He has the interesting notion that ‘data-ink’ ought to be minimised. In other words, any information will stand out more clearly the less printing is done to present it.: “The number of information-carrying dimensions depicted should not exceed the number of dimensions in the data”. You’ve got to be prepared to leap from traffic deaths and government expenditure to the properties of chemical elements, and be prepared for lots of detail on the difference between boxplots, bar charts, histograms, and scatterplots.

He’s basically in favour of simplifying representation – reducing what he calls ‘chart-junk’. That is, anything which does not contribute to revealing information. Yet there remain strange contradictions. One of his edicts (which seems sensible) is that “Graphics can be shrunk way down – Many data graphics can be reduced in area to half their currently published size with virtually no loss in legibility and information.” Yet he often presents examples of bad (but visually attractive) graphics across double page spreads. And he’s not bashful. When it comes to naming one of his own designs (a list of voting patterns in the 1980 US elections) it becomes not a mere list but a ‘SUPERtable’.

But this is a stimulating and attractive production. I was surprised that there wasn’t a formal bibliography, but he chooses to foreground his references directly into the generous page margins as a design feature. He developed a graphic style for this book which he has stuck to ever since. The basic formula is beautiful illustrations, some occupying a whole page, with the relevant text condensed in a crisp and economic style. No topic exceeds a double page spread, and the book is produced from very high quality paper, printed like a work of art, and bound as if it were a rare first edition.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1997, pp.156, ISBN: 0961392126


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Filed Under: Graphic design, Information Design Tagged With: Displaying information, Edward Tufte, Graphic design, Information design, The Visual Display of Information

Visual Explanations

July 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

best-selling illustrated essays on presenting information

Visual Explanations is Edward Tufte’s passionate manifesto for intelligent information design. He is concerned with the need for scale, accuracy, and truthful proportion in the visualisation of data. The book derives much of its charm from the beautiful reproduction of its illustrative materials. He includes engravings, photographs, maps, computer-generated images, and even built-in flaps showing motion and before-after effects. The diversity of his examples is just as impressive.

Clarity and excellence in thinking is very much like clarity and excellence in the display of data. When principles of design replicate principles of thought, the act of arranging information becomes an act of insight.

Visual ExplanationsThey are drawn from scientific papers, conjurors’ manuals, and even books designed to be read under water. In one stunning example, he uses video snapshots of his own two-dimensional yet dynamic visualisation of a thunderstorm. Tufte [pronounced “TUFF-tee”] makes his central argument in a chapter which has now become famous.

This discusses the mis-representation of data related to the 1986 Challenger space shuttle which resulted in a disastrous explosion and the death of all the cosmonauts on board. His dense technical analysis of data-presentation and bad practice is used to argue that the fatal accident could have been averted if charts and diagrams had been presented more intelligently, more accurately.

A chapter on conjuring tricks focuses on the clever representation of temporal progression in single illustrations from how-to-do-it books. However, it has to be said that sometimes it’s not quite clear what point he’s making, and he seems to be struggling with what is obvious: that it’s difficult to represent fluid motion in static, two-dimensional images.

Eventually it emerges that he wishes to compare magic with it’s opposite – teaching. One amazes by concealment, the other should inform by revelation. “Your audience should know beforehand what you’re going to do.” That’s a useful insight for some of us.

His attitude is enormously confident and persuasive. Yet if you can brace yourself as a reader, it sometimes seems that he doesn’t always follow his own theories in the presentation of materials – and this in a book which he wrote, designed, and published himself. On some pages, it’s difficult to link illustration to argument; some reproductions are disproportionately large for the point they are making; and he pursues the odd habit of crowding the generous page margins with bibliographic minutiae which would normally be reserved for chapter endnotes.

He writes in a cryptic, elliptical manner, and is much given to compressed generalisations and gnomic claims such as “to make verbs visible, is at the heart of information design” – though this approach can also be quite witty, as when he dismisses one of the bad examples as “better than nothing ([but] that’s all it’s better than”.

Despite these occasional oddities, there are thought-provoking ideas on almost every page. For instance, the idea that the public health warnings on US billboard cigarette advertisements are less effective because they are difficult to read, crammed as they are into boxed text, sans-serif fonts, in continuous capitals, and underlined – which makes four typographical solecisms in one.

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: SMOKING CAUSES LUNG CANCER, HEART DISEASE, EMPHYSEMA, AND MAY COMPLICATE PREGNANCY.

Despite the graphic variety of his presentations, many of his arguments are amazingly orchestrated onto single or double-page spreads, and the book is an almost irresistibly beautiful production. What he’s actually talking about is visual rhetoric: “by establishing a structure of rhythm and relationships, [graphic] parallelism becomes the poetry of visual information”. We might wish to query some of his theoretical claims, but it’s very hard to be critically detached from such a seductive presentation of evidence – which paradoxically is the very point he’s warning us about.

© Roy Johnson 2002

Visual Explanations   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations, Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1997, pp.156, ISBN: 0961392126


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Filed Under: Graphic design, Information Design Tagged With: Displaying information, Edward Tufte, Graphic design, Information design

Visual Language for the Web

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Visual Language for the Web is a book about the language of icons, buttons, and navigational aids used in the design of graphical interfaces of computer software programs. The first chapter deals with Mayan hieroglyphs and Chinese ideograms – writing with pictures. This establishes how much information can be conveyed semiotically. Paul Honeywill then looks at how graphical icons are used in interface design – and how well we understand them, particularly on a multi-national level. Some, like the folder icon, have been successful and are now widely used.

Visual Language for the WebOthers seem to be understandable only within the context of the program for which they are designed. Next comes an explanation of the design of icons, taking account of the psychology of visual perception and the technology of rendering images on screen. He explains for instance why colours and font sizes are rendered differently on PCs and Macs.

He offers an introduction to digital font technology which will be useful for anyone who doesn’t already know how serif and sans-serif fonts are used for quite different purposes.

To illustrate the principles on which graphic icons best operate, he presents two case studies of designing business logos. He considers pictographic languages ranging from the natural Mayan hieroglyphics and Sumerian cuneiform, to recent experiments such as Elephant’s Memory. But he seems reluctant to acknowledge their limitations in telling anything but simple narratives.

However, the very absence of any individual authority on the Internet means that any graphic icons which become generally accepted will be those which are commonly understood.

The last part of the book looks at testing recognition of icons – and comes to the unsurprising conclusion that the most effective and best known are those such as the magnifying glass ‘Search’ icon which appears in lots of different programs.

It has to be said that all this is sometimes discussed at a very theoretical level:

the day sign for Manik when it appears without the day sign cartouche in a non-calendrical context is chi

But this will be of interest to anybody concerned with the study of writing systems, as well as graphic designers, usability experts, and information architects.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Paul Honeywill, Visual Language for the World Wide Web, Exeter: Intellect, 1999, pp.192, ISBN: 187151696X


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Filed Under: Information Design, Theory, Web design Tagged With: Computers, Product design, Theory, Web design

Visualizing Data

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

explaining data with the Processing environment

The doyen of data presentation is Edward Tufte, but even he has (so far) only dealt with the display of static information. Ben Fry’s new book combines similar aesthetic principles with the technical knowledge of how such presentations can be made dynamically. He uses a simple programming environment and API called Processing (which he developed as part of his PhD research). This is a free downloadable open source program based on Java (processing.org).

Visualizing DataHe’s an excellent communicator, and introduces his topics in gradual stages. The first few chapters are a gentle introduction to presenting data, and then gradually he presents more technically advanced approaches. What he proposes embraces a number of disciplines – statistics, data mining, graphic design, and information visualization – but he insists at the outset that the most important thing is to ask interesting questions. It’s all very well having huge amounts of data, but you need to ask ‘What is meaningful about it?’.

The process of creating a visual presentation is a logical series of steps. First the data is acquired: (he uses the US system of zip codes as an example). Then the data is parsed: that is, changed into a format that tags each part with its intended use. Next, any unwanted data is filtered out, then the data is mined – in this case to show its maximum and minimum values.

The next stage is deciding how to present the results – as a table, bar chart, graph, or diagram. Then the results can be refined. And finally, because this entire process is conducted digitally, drawing on processing power which is now available on even a standard computer, the data can be interrogated interactively. We can zoom in on maps, or refine searches by name or size.

In the next part of the book he offers an explanation of how to use the Processing software to create your own displays and visualize your own data. This is done in a straightforward manner that even someone without programming skills could follow. He also provides guidance on the philosophy of designing this type of software. Keep your designs as small and re-usable as possible. Work with samples of your data to begin with. Don’t start by trying to build a cathedral.

Subsequent chapters deal with different types of exercise – showing data as a physical map (the population of the US in states) then a time series (national consumption of tea and coffee 1910-2000). Next comes data with complex inter-relations (national results of all baseball teams in a single season).

As he says in his introduction, he is not offering a series of ready-made programs for presenting data. Instead, he is demonstrating the general principles by which such design problems can be solved, and leaving you to create your own.

Tree maps and network graphs are shown displaying word usage in a literary text (Mark Twain) and he even shows examples of results which are not useful – in order to emphasise the point he makes over and over again: you must ask the right questions of the data you are interrogating.

He ends by returning to the earliest stages of his thesis with some quite advanced level guidance on the acquisition and parsing of data. If by this time you’re not convinced (as I was) that he knows exactly what he’s talking about, have a look at his stunning personal web site at www.benfry.com.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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Ben Fry, Visualizing Data, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, 2007, pp.366, ISBN: 0596514557


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Filed Under: Information Design Tagged With: Data presentation, Information design, Visualization, Web design

Web Navigation

June 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

navigation, structure, and usability for web design

Web sites have sometimes been described in terms of ‘generations’. David Siegel for instance describes how first generation sites were rapidly thrown together with no greater ambition than to get pages of HTML code onto the Web. The second generation added graphics, started to be concerned with page layout [even though HTML code is not designed for that purpose] and often added eye-popping special effects. Third generation sites have brought some of these excesses under control, and are designed to make the user experience more meaningful. Web Navigation is emphatically third generation.

Web NavigationThere’s no doubt that clever designers have managed to produce some visually stunning Web pages – but many information architects are now beginning to ask questions such as “Can visitors find their way around the site?” and “Is this site achieving its purpose?” The eye candy effects of flashy graphics often mask a lack of content and an incoherent maze of links which visitors are glad to leave quickly via the nearest exit. Jennifer Fleming’s Web Navigation is a serious and articulate plea for intelligent Web site design, and it is based on principles which owe more to information theory and coherent structure than to the luminous-glamour school of graphics-based design.

Like most good designers, she insists on a user-centred rather than client-centred approach to web design. What’s the difference? you might ask. Well, intelligent designers are now beginning to realise that web sites are often created to impress the commissioning clients, rather than the people who will be using them. Men in suits will applaud spiffy graphics when a new site is revealed at a presentation – but they will probably never need to log on again.

The book’s structure reflects the clarity of her purpose. There are six chapters on the foundations of navigation design, then in the second part an analysis of successful sites. There are four appendices: technical tips, a glossary of navigational terms, a list of web resources, and a bibliography. The accompanying CD comes with trial versions of software (including the highly praised Dreamweaver) and it has a marvellous ‘netography’ with listings of articles, web sites, and online resources covering navigation, usability and testing, organisation of information, information design, document markup and scripting. [I loaded the disk, browsed the sites she recommends, and all the links were working.]

Her advice is to provide clear, simple, and consistent navigational aids – and she offers a particularly strong warning against using metaphors such as the office or the supermarket [though curiously, the CD uses icons]. Navigation that works should:

  • be easily learned
  • remain consistent
  • provide feedback
  • appear in context
  • offer alternatives
  • be economic in action and time
  • provide clear visual messages
  • use clear understandable labels
  • be appropriate to site’s purpose
  • support user’s goals and behaviour

Now that’s an important free lesson for you! She is in favour of any interactivity, such as rollovers (‘OnMouseOver’) which provide feedback, and is sceptical of the ‘Back’ button on the grounds that users might enter a site at any page. Where would they be going ‘back’ to? She also raises other interesting navigational questions, such as ‘where will you be when you’ve finished reading a page, and where will you wish or need to go?’

She recommends multiple navigational routes and aids, plus guidance. For instance, a site might have a framed and ‘no-frames’ version, a graphics and no graphics version. It will certainly have navigation hot spots at the top and bottom of every page, maybe a contents list in left-hand frame, plus icons, labels, and anything else which helps users find their way around.

One of the interesting features of her approach is that she illustrates her argument with detailed reference to the work of other ‘information architects’ such as Jakob Nielsen, Clement Mok, Edward Tufte, and David Siegel. The reader is thereby presented with a range of approaches to this relatively new subject. There are lots of bibliographic suggestions and URLs in side-bars on the page – and those I checked were all up-to-date, which is an important feature in such a fast-changing medium.

It’s a book aimed at professionals. For instance, her descriptions of the site design process assume that there will be teams of designers in sessions at a corporate level using flipcharts, video recordings, and even team-working software. There’s lots on brainstorming and chunking in what are now called ‘focus groups’. But these principles could be followed by what I suspect is more likely to be the average reader – somebody working in a spare room at home.

This is a book for people who want to take web design seriously. It’s significant that she spends so much time discussing the thoughtful planning, research, and testing of a site, rather than the creation of flashy effects and animated gimmicks which adorn so many KEWL sites. She has powerful and revealing arguments in favour of a consistent design process (so that the arbitrary element of success or failure can be removed). This is fairly obvious when you think about it – but that’s true of many good ideas.

She includes a full account of professional designers at work, with pointers to the resources they use – such as David Siegel’s free downloadable ‘profiling’ materials at www.secretsites.com for instance.

This is the business studies version of web design manuals, packed with thought-provoking information on determining user goals and expectations. She describes the use of personal interviews, people ‘shadowing’ users throughout the working day, and ‘disposable camera studies’ where users record what they find interesting. Not many individuals will have the resources to be so thorough, and sometimes the ‘feedback-usability-testing’ approach makes this all seem like a science rather than the sales-pitch that it is – as if we can predict how many people will come to our site to buy widgets.

In the second half of the book her notions are put to work analysing the navigational methods and structure at sites built for shopping, entertainment, learning, and community services. This struck me as slightly less interesting than the first part, but still worth reading for the revealing tips and guidance notes embedded in her analysis. The observations, as before, are that successful sites are customer-oriented, and that they give extra consideration to online customers because they lack the navigational support provided during comparable user experiences in libraries, airports and shopping malls.

If there is a weakness in her examinations, it’s that these are often not much more than descriptions of sites – though they are nevertheless well-illustrated mini-lectures, with plenty of screen captures. For instance, she heaps praise on Amazon.com for their search facility and one-click ordering system. However, this doesn’t take into account that the company, despite its multi-million dollar turnover, hasn’t actually made a profit so far.

It’s worth noting that a lot of what she says about helping users through the layers of a site is based on the US-centred assumption that people are going to spend a lot of time browsing – because they have free local telephone calls. But European (certainly UK) users will not have such luxuries. They’ll hit a site, search for what they’re looking for, then disconnect quickly. This economically-driven difference in user behaviour should be taken into account by anyone theorising about navigation, browsing, and web design.

But there are many good tips offered en passant – including some which might seem obvious, but which are often ignored by site designers. For instance, I’ve noticed that in the UK, quangos and government departments are very often reluctant to display their postal address [possibly reflecting the arrogant nature of these organisations].
But she insists that

Making your street address, phone number, and email address easily available is not only about completing an online sales pitch…It’s about other elusive qualities: trust and community.

Similarly, many UK universities would do well to heed her advice on making themselves more accessible and well-presented. How many times have you visited a university site and found no lists of courses on offer or staff who teach them? She points to the short-sightedness of this approach:

A large percentage of visitors to a university site are applicants for admission, or are thinking of becoming applicants…If a university can answer their questions fairly easily, it bodes well for the entire process. A positive experience on the Web – especially for college applicants, who tend to make decisions on gut feelings – is a powerful factor in decision-making.

It’s good that she chooses different (and challenging) types of sites to analyse. Searching for information is quite a different matter to being entertained or pushing round a virtual shopping trolley. The section on information sites [Lycos, Computers.com] is particularly interesting, because she forces us to think about different types of questions which might be asked of a site, and the different approaches to searching users develop.

Until recently, just providing information via the Web was a laudable pursuit. It was enough to be one of the forward-thinking few who recognised the power of the Web for mass communication. Those days are gone, replaced with a new challenge: providing increasingly complex layers of information, and making it all seem simple.

Very near the end of the book she presents a simple formula for successful sites. Aspirant site designers would do themselves a favour by writing her tips on Post-It notes and sticking them on their monitors:

  • keep every page below 20K
  • recycle headers
  • keep graphics small and simple

Jennifer Fleming has a background in library and information science, and her advice and observations strike me as more seriously well-founded than most of the web design manuals I have ever seen. This is a wonderfully rich and thought-provoking study which anybody analysing or building web sites should put on their list of essential reading.

© Roy Johnson 2000

Web Navigation   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Jennifer Fleming, Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience, Sebastopol: O’Reilly, 1998, pp.253 plus CD-ROM, ISBN: 1565923510


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Filed Under: Information Design, Web design Tagged With: Experience design, Information architecture, Information design, Navigation, Usability, Web design, Web Navigation

Web Site Design is Communication Design

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

“This book is not a book about web technology … [it’s] about the design of web sites, studied as a communication process” Thea van der Geest makes it plain from the start that her approach is focussed on information architecture and communication design issues. In fact her work is an academic summary of ten case studies based in the Washington area of the US – an interesting mix of public services, local government, and state transport – as well as local web giants such as Amazon and Microsoft (who she refers to as ‘the Internet Bookstore’ and ‘The Software Corporation’).

Web Site Design is Communication Design What the reports offer is first-hand accounts from the designers of these sites, indicating the development of their policies, strategies, and techniques. After a couple of ground-clearing chapters dealing with the advantages of using the Web as a communications medium, she gets down to the heart of the book. This is a detailed breakdown of the stages of the design process – from the original conception of a web site, through to testing, revision, and maintenance. Here there is a wealth of information for information architects, web designers, project managers, and anybody else who needs an organisational overview of the design process.

She points to the unpredictable effects which the establishment of a web site can have on individuals and organisations – changes to job descriptions, increased costs, shifts in policy, the sudden need for response to new customers.

The last part of the book is concerned with evaluating web site effectiveness by analysing log files and the information from cookies. There is not much detailed technical information here: she is more concerned with larger strategic issues – such as the fact that once data on user profiles reaches a certain size, it becomes part of marketing strategy. She also discusses the problems of dealing with email feedback, focus groups, and questionnaires.

The final chapter is a series of checklists which are process-oriented. They cover all the stages of web design. They assume a large-scale organisation, with lots of personnel resources, but the principles she illustrates will be of use to anybody who wants to make a web site efficient and maybe even profitable.

This study is mainly aimed at communications professionals. It’s a web design manual without a single line of HTML code, but it should be on the reading list for anyone involved in a serious web project.

© Roy Johnson 2001

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Thea M. van der Geest, Web Site Design is Communication Design, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001, pp.165, ISBN: 9027232024


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Filed Under: Information Design, Web design Tagged With: Communication, Information design, Web design

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