Book Review: Defensive Design for the Web
Posted by tibbetts Sun, 29 May 2005 15:17:00 GMT
37 signal is one of the neatest companies out there in terms of advancing the state of the art in web design. It seems like they do almost as much as Google, presumably without spending such embarrassing amounts of money. If you haven't check out some of their projects, like Basecamp, Ta-da Lists, and Backpack, you really should. They build really nice web apps. Not only that, but they give back to the community with things like the yellow fade technique and a presentation on How to make big things happen with a small team (slides) (summary).
Jesse Vincent just shared with me a copy of their book De fensive Design for the Web: How to Improve Error Messages, Help, Forms, and Other Crisis Points. It was a very quick read this morning before breakfast, and I think also worthwhile, even though I am not currently a builder of real webapps. I find well designed web applications interesting, and like learning more techniques for doing it. This book is mostly about user-level guidelines, rather than technical detail. But that is important too, since when building technical frameworks it is important to enable the right kinds of user interaction.
The book is pretty good. It gives a set of 40 guidelines with real examples of sites that break and sites that follow the guideline. The guidelines mostly focus on what to do when something goes wrong or how to keep something from going wrong. The core idea is that when looking at the usability of your website, the error cases are as important as the non-error cases.
One area in which I disagree is their support of restrictive forms. They encourage sites to prevent users from entering incorrect data through the use of drop down lists (for things like states or dates) and client-side validation with JavaScript. The principle is that if you keep users from ever entering bad data, then you are sure they won't have a confusing experience fixing errors. I tend to find that these restrictive forms harm my user experience more than they help though. I'd rather type a free-form address, or phone number, or date, and be corrected, than have to mouse- or arrow-around in 6 drop down lists to enter two dates.
Combining client- and server-side validation of form data is an interesting challenge for framework development. Is it possible to easily combine these so that site developers don't have two divergent code bases (most likely in different languages) to maintain? Consolidating this functionality probably requires JavaScript code generation, so that the server-side encoding of the validation rules can be pushed down to the client. I'm not aware of any JavaScript code generation that really makes for a usable system, so maybe this idea would be doomed anyway.
Because it ignores technical details and focuses on user experience, De fensive Design for the Web is a quick read. It's guidelines are not perfect, but they are reasonable. It presents you with a helpful checklist which can be used to improve your crisis points, and thus to improve your sites whole user experience. And it is lightweight enough you can throw it at a coworker without be charged with assault. I recommend it for people doing webapp development.
