Designing Web usability

What Hacker News says

1. aasasdJan 2019
   Notably even the frontend path omits anything on how websites should function―even though it's in a different field if you're for strict ultra-specialization, it's still recommended to learn how to not accidentally make sites that are hostile to users. Arguably, it should be learned before the programming part, so it's ingrained from the start.

   E.g. for me the defining text is Jakob Nielsen's “Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity,” which probably didn't lose any value in the time since publication, because humans don't change so fast.

   P.S. I'm also of firm belief that the proximity principle is by far the most important tool of graphic design and that everyone should learn to see and use it. To, ahem, not make diagrams where everything is lumped together.

   (I'm a backend coder, by the way.)

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2. arkitaipMay 2011
   IMHO you first need to understand design, its various sub fields (i.e. typography, colors, layout), user experience design/interaction design/usability, and finally how all of this applies to the web. You can learn the basics by reading books but the only way to truly understand and master is by study this things in the world and by practicing them. Start thinking about design, analyze it in your daily life, do your own makeovers of sites you use, design a blog theme, etc, etc.

   As for web typography, you want to check of the latest generation of font embedding because that's where the real magic's at. The most known web font solutions are: CSS3 (font-face), typeface.js, cufon, flir, sifr, Google Font API, Typekit.

   Here's a list of quality books on design and typography:

       A History of Graphic Design
       Before & After Page Design
       Designing Brand Identity
       Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
       Graphic Design Solutions
       How Designers Think
       Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data
       Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop 
       The Complete Manual of Typography
       The Designer's Guide to Color Combinations
       The Elements of Graphic Design: Space, Unity, Page Architecture, and Type
       The Elements of Typographic Style
       The New Typography
       The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
       Thinking with Type: A Primer for Designers
       Typography Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Using Type in Graphic Design 
   	

   Books on web design:

       About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
       Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become  
       Bulletproof Web Design
       Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide
       Designing Web Usability
       Designing With Web Standards
       Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design
       Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction
       Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
       Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed
       Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
       Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web  
       Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction
       Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems
       The Essential Guide to User Interface Design
       The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
       Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology
       Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks

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3. NekojoeFeb 2010
   Have you read Jakob Nielson's work? - http://www.useit.com/

   Designing Web Usability would be a good start - http://www.useit.com/jakob/webusability/

   And Homepage Usability is good for screenshots with examples - http://www.useit.com/homepageusability/

   I would take what he says with a pinch of salt at times, as he can be very metric based. Sometimes it helps when to know to bend the rules. I remember for years he was very strict about hyperlink colours insisting that they should always be blue for unvisited and purple for visited.

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4. ojbyrneJul 2008
   I have always liked his stuff, and I read and liked Designing Web Usability, but the enterprise-ish pricing on the real meat of his research annoys me immensely.

   E.g.

   "Usability of Intranet Portals A Report from the Trenches: Experiences From Real-Life Portal Projects 3rd Edition 343 pages PDF format

   $348 for a single report, $698 for the report and a site license to make copies within your organization and place on your intranet. (No shipping/handling fees will be added: it's a download.)"

   The parenthetical statement is hilarious. Site Licenses for books are hilarious.

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5. dcminterMay 2025
   He did a book ("Designing Web Usability" I think) with an unconventional layout and it clearly hadn't been user-tested as it had a flaw (text too close to the binding) that made it ironically hard to use.

   I think he was on point with a lot of stuff, but I've been a bit jaded ever since!

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6. paulryanrogersOct 2021
   Maybe I'm just nostalgic but I preferred dense UIs of the 90s. At least those which didn't have too much empty space, and communicated grouping with boring stuff like fieldset.

   Now it seems I must scroll forever and there are no discernible anchors to link to. When studying web design in the early aughts the popular Nielson book ("Designing Web Usability") argued for separate pages over a lot of scrolling. For informational sites I think that approach is superior.

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