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Ambient Findability

July 10, 2009 by Roy Johnson

why designers must keep users in mind

Peter Morville was co-author (with Louis Rosenfeld) of one of the essential books on information architecture, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. This is his solo follow-up, which looks at the latest features of on-line life and tries to see what lies ahead. Ambient Findability is a very positive, almost excited, view of the last decade in web development. His central thesis is that information literacy, information architecture, and usability are all critical components of a new world order.

Ambient Findability He believes we have almost an ethical imperative to design the best possible software and web services to enhance the quality of our online life. All this has come about because of the unprecedented developments in data manipulation, connectivity, hyperlinking, and interactive services which have emerged in the last few years.

His new take on arranging information and navigational systems insists that they must be constructed around what the user requires, not the designer, and that they must be constructed with maximum findability in mind. The users, purchasers, or consumers are now Kings – because of their experiences on sites such as eBay and Amazon.

Never before has the consumer had so much access to product information before the point of purchase.

He looks at wayfinding systems in the natural world, then considers the relationship between language and information retrieval, including how we define meta-data. He sets great store by the theory of information analyst Calvin Moores, who suggested that people will not seek information that makes their jobs harder, even if it might benefit the organisation they work for.

For this reason, he has positive things to say about gossip and browsing. We are conditioned by evolution to pick up signals and recognise what he calls ‘textual landmarks’ in our search for information and our interpretation of the world. “Technology moves fast. Evolution moves slow.”

Because computers are becoming smaller and smaller, he then moves on to an encomium for the mobile device. This is followed by the technology which comes closest to fulfilling his desire for maximum findability – GPS (Global Positioning Systems).

He then looks at the issues of reconciling good web design with the competing demands of usability and efficient marketing – and solves the problem with a mantra that summarises his principal thesis: “Findability precedes usability. You can’t use what you can’t find.”

This leads into what I take to be the heart of the book – his take on the state of information architecture today. First he explains the competing views regarding the ‘semantic web’, which centre around definitions of meta-data so far as I understand it. Then he argues that these views can be reconciled if we accept the traditional roles of taxonomies for defining data – along with what he called ‘folksonomies’ whereby people put their own definitions on tagged objects.

This is not as important a book as Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, but it’s a thought-provoking guide to recent web developments and what might happen next in the online world. It’s full of interesting and provocative ideas, relevant graphics (first time I’ve seen colour in an O’Reilly publication!) and all the references are fully sourced.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Peter Morville, Ambient Findability, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2005, pp.188, ISBN: 0596007655


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

Designing Interfaces

July 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

navigation, interactivity, and graphic design techniques

O’Reilly have recently taken to adding colour to their publications – and it works. The pages are more visually interesting, and the reader gets a more accurate picture of what will appear on screen. This book is attempting to get down to the fundamentals of interface design – How many clicks, how many screens do you need to see before you get to what you want? In fact Jenifer Tidwell starts of with usability issues, showing what real users do and ask of interfaces. Then she starts considering design, starting from the top and most general level – the organisation of content, or information architecture. This also includes consideration of the user interface or screen.

Designing InterfacesThe main strength of her approach is that she is very thorough. Her examples include different types of software and hardware. A design that works on a computer screen will have to be adapted if it’s going to be read on a mobile phone, and if viewed on a TV screen, you won’t have a mouse for navigation. She deals with web pages, installation programs, spreadsheets, and even graphic design packages – but keeps these issues in mind at all times.

Next comes navigation which deals with methods for leading the user through the contents. These include navigation panels, sequence maps, breadcrumb trails, and colour coding.

The next level down in terms of detail is page layout. This introduces elements of graphic design in arranging both content and navigation. This where the going can get rough. The layout part is easy if you’ve got a reasonable eye for design, but after that you need to choose between columns and tabs, and fixed width and liquid pages. She explains all the options, with the advantages and drawbacks of each.

Then comes what she calls the ‘verbs’ of the interface – objects such as buttons, action panels, and menus which make things happen. I was pleased to see that she gave as an example of bad design just how difficult it is to cancel a print job in Windows.

It’s fairly obvious that her principal interest is in information graphics – maps, tables, and graphs plus all their variants. Here she covers the ground which Edward Tufte has made his own – but you’ll find her prose easier to understand. She covers tooltips, expandable views, and what she calls ‘data brushing’ whereby the user can select which part(s) of a collection of information to view on screen.

Then comes a section on the much trickier issue of designing interactive choice lists. There are all sorts of possibilities here – forms, checkboxes, toggle buttons, dropdown lists, and so on – but the important point is that she illustrates them all, pointing to their advantages and weaknesses.

She even covers the design of interfaces for editors – such as text and image editing programs. Not many people outside a technological elite few will need to know these matters, but I found it instructive to see the general principles behind so many of the drag and drop or click and resize functions we come across all the time.

She finishes with a chapter any designer will enjoy – dealing with the graphic design of what appears on screen. This involves colour, spacing, typography, balance, and every other facet of visual rhetoric to make a visitor wish to stay on the site. I picked up some useful tips on hairlines and rounded corners here.

It’s a handsome, well-designed book – as befits its subject – and she includes a generous bibliography. O’Reilly have done her proud.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Jenifer Tidwell, Designing Interfaces, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2005, pp.331, ISBN: 0596008031


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Filed Under: Graphic design, Information Design Tagged With: Computers, Designing Interfaces, Graphic design, Information design, Navigation, Web design

Don’t Make Me Think

July 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

illustrated guide to new web strategies and usability

This is one of the new generation of web usability manuals. The objective isn’t to produce sophisticated pages full of tricky code. It’s more concerned with general strategies – based not on what web designers can do, but on what web users actually need. Steve Krug’s sub-title makes his approach clear – ‘A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability’. He admits from the outset of Don’t Make Me Think that he will only comment on successful sites. [This is the opposite approach to Flanders and Willis’s very successful Web Pages that Suck]. And like many other instances of successfully applied common sense, his advice comes from carefully observed details. In almost every example of successful implementation here, you feel like saying ‘Oh yes – that seems so obvious now!.’

Don't Make Me ThinkHe’s particularly good at analysing the finer points of positioning instructions on the page, the careful use of navigation devices, and the reduction of all text and choices to an unambiguous minimum. That’s the point of his title. We want to get through web sites with the least possible thought and struggle. He has a light, friendly style, and almost every point he makes is elegantly illustrated by examples from well known web sites which you can check. He offers a detailed study of tabs for navigation, then a few sample pages as tests to see if his theories work – which they do.

There’s also a lot of good advice on the design of home pages – using and organising the screen real estate as efficiently as possible and maximising the information conveyed by visual messages. His arguments are illustrated with analyses and makeovers of well known sites.

He’s very strong on usability testing, and offers good reasons why it should be done as early in the design process as possible. He also shows how it can be done very simply, and even argues that a small group of three or four testers is enough.

This is a pricey but very elegant publication from New Riders – who have set new standards in book production values. It’s amongst their web design best sellers – and quite rightly so.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Indianapolis (IN): New Riders, 2000, pp.195, ISBN 0789723107


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Fresh Styles for Web Designers

June 8, 2009 by Roy Johnson

new web design strategies and techniques

So far, web design theory has been split between usability minimalism as urged by gurus such as Jakob Nielsen at one end of the spectrum, and the bandwidth-hogging graphic designs of David Siegel at the other. Now Curt Cloninger suggests we can combine the two approaches – and he shows how it can be done. This is one of those Web strategy guides which assume you know the details of designing pages.

Fresh Styles for Web Designers What it offers is a survey of new strategies in structure and graphic presentation – some of them on the edge of the avant garde. Cloninger takes the line that these are the early days of the Web, that there are severe limitations on what is possible, but that inventive designers will embrace the limitations and turn them into positives.

The reasons he offers are that not all sites are driven by e-commerce or a desire to maximise hits. Some are exhibition or display sites; galleries or individual portfolios of work – something like an elaborate visiting card. There is no reason why such sites shouldn’t indulge themselves with the sorts of glamorous graphics and ‘entry pages’ supported by designers such as David Siegel.

He categorises sites as ‘Gothic’, ‘Grid-based’, ‘Grunge’, ‘Mondrian poster’, ‘Paper Bag’, and ‘HTMinimaLism’ – and despite his post-hippy approach these distinctions do eventually make sense. Designers in these camps treat the page design, the Web strategy, and the visitor experience in significantly different ways.

One of my favourites was the minimalist style – sites from the competition www.the5K.org which feature pages of games, puzzles and art collections the total size which must come in under five kilobytes. [Try it!] The other was the sci-fi look of what he calls ‘Drafting/Table Transformer’ style led by Mike Young, whose work is featured in the recently published book of animated graphics.

Each chapter describes the features of one style. It then analyses examples, with well-produced screenshots of sites which are often private and experimental. Then he tells you how to achieve these effects. It’s a very good formula – no matter what you think of the sites.

He’s quite keen on distressed backgrounds and the grunge typography of designers such as David Carson – and he tells you how to create the effects. This will appeal to those who want to make a visual impact. He has favoured designers who he claims have been influential – Mike Cina, Miika Saksi, and a Chicago design group 37signals.

There’s a lot of detailed instruction on how to achieve special effects – most of them done in Photoshop. The general strategy is to maximise visual effects whilst minimising download time. And it has to be said that all the effects are beautifully illustrated, with full pages of elegantly presented coding.

© Roy Johnson 2004

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Curt Cloninger, Fresh Styles for Web Designers, Indianapolis IN: New Riders, 2001, pp.211, ISBN: 0735710740


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Information Architecture

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

large-scale Web site structure, navigation, and usability

When it first appeared in 1998, Information Architecture became an instant classic amongst information architects. It now appears in its third edition, much enlarged and updated. The new edition reflects the rapid expansion and technical sophistication of large interactive web sites in the last few years. Rosenfeld and Morville deal with all the issues raised in organising information and navigational systems in the design of large-scale sites. Their important starting point is a recommendation that big sites should use three types of information organisation, which they identify as hierarchical, database, and hypertext.

Information Architecture Visitors to a site should have more than one possible route to the same piece of information. They ask some quite fundamental and interesting questions in their updated chapters. These cover issues of organisation, labelling, navigation, and searching – plus new chapters on thesauruses and meta-data.

The new edition has been given many more case studies, and lists of resources on IA have been added, many of which did not exist at the time of the first edition, and there’s a very good bibliography which painlessly blends print and web-based information. Navigation has been expanded into global, local, and contextual systems, and there is a lot more detail on search engines.

Another section which has been considerably expanded is that on classification systems and ‘knowledge management’. That is – where to put things, how to arrange, label and store information.

There’s also a much-enlarged section on the management of web development projects – from the initial strategy meetings through content analysis and mapping, to delivery and maintenance.

They present real life case studies, including one which details how a strategy report was written for Weather.com. Anybody who needs help with report writing will profit from reading this chapter. ‘Information Architecture’ was a relatively new term only a few years ago, but now as you can probably guess, it is of use to anybody who needs to organise information, ideas, or even physical objects – such as books in a library.

There’s an excellent account of how to draw up site maps and flow diagrams which help to explain the deep level architecture of sites to those who are going to populate them with content.

The same is true for page layout diagrams – which they call ‘wireframes’. These test the arrangement of items on main pages before they are passed on to a graphic designer. Architecture and usability are tested before the application of a graphic. It’s rather like designing the layout of a web page with table borders switched on – before setting them to zero.

They take an enthusiastic line on the use of navigational metaphors (the shop, the office, the library) about which other commentators such as Barbara Fleming and Jakob Nielsen are more cautious. The argument against this approach is that the metaphor of an office or a library will not mean much to people who are not familiar with them. And of course the same is true for icons and symbols.

This is a book for serious designers, project managers, and of course information architects. It is also a contribution to design theory which, en passant, makes librarians into the heroes of the information age. The valuable experience embedded within it will make useful reading for anybody organising information, designing a site, or providing content for it. If you read the first or second edition, it’s worth reading the third for the wealth of new material.

© Roy Johnson 2006

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Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Sebastopol (CA): O’Reilly, third edition, 2006, pp.461, ISBN: 0596527349


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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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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

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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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Web Style Guide

July 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

principles of good design, navigation, and usability

This is a guide to Web site design, not to HTML coding. In fact, it will be entirely suitable for someone who has a basic grasp of HTML, but who wants to learn about the strategic issues of how to communicate via this amazingly cheap and democratic medium. The Web Style Guide began its life as advice to users at the Centre for Advanced Instructional Media at Yale University. Lynch and Horton start out with basic design concepts and information architecture, and wisely advise following the principles of good navigation which arise out of centuries of print culture – whilst making plenty of subtle distinctions between different applications and user groups, such as web sites for training, teaching, and reference.

Web Style GuideThey deal with issues of page length, typography, information chunking, and the use of frames; and they spell out the advantages of cascading style sheets. There is even a chapter on editorial style – on how to write most effectively for Web pages: summary first, short sentences, and chunked information. They go into a lot of detail on graphics and multi-media, and they end up with really useful tips on animation, audio, and compression.

Even though they take a ‘No HTML’ approach, it might have been useful to show how some of the effects can be created. On the control of vertical and horizontal white space on the page, they are fans of the David Siegel one-pixel spacer trick, where a small graphic spacer is stretched out to create indents, half line spacing, and even empty vertical columns. It’s a shame that Yale University Press has not decided to do justice to the original of this publication by reproducing some of the pages in colour. The section on graphics for instance is undermined by grey-toned pictures.

There is a consistent stress on user-friendliness and web-centred design, and their advice comes in the form of compressed wisdoms which suggest they’re based on a lot of experience. The style is wonderfully concise: almost every sentence is a well-crafted digest of advice.

Hypertext links pose two fundamental design problems. They disrupt the flow of content in your site by inviting the reader to leave your site. They can also radically alter the context of information by dumping the reader into unfamiliar territory without preambles or explanation.”

I first read most of this book by downloading PDF files from their website. At that time the text actually looked more attractive on screen than it did in print. However, this has been rectified in the latest edition. This is now a very attractive book, and an excellent publication which combines the basic principles of information architecture with well-informed tips on website design.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton, Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites, New Haven: Yale University Press, second edition 2002, pp.164, ISBN 0300088981


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