Review: Designing Web Usability

Just gave up on Design­ing Web Usabil­ity. I mooched the book on the rec­om­men­da­tion of dozens of smart peo­ple that stated this is the defin­i­tive usabil­ity guide for the web.

Lies! This book was out-of-date when it was pub­lished. The guy rants for like 10 pages on the virtue of using blue col­ored links. Another 10 pages on using fluid-width designs (instead of today’s norm of fixed-width with addi­tional style sheets — or an alter­nate theme — to help out devices with lim­ited capa­bil­i­ties). Another 10 pages — with charts and graphs! — out­lin­ing how quickly peo­ple upgrade their browsers and con­demn­ing the use of new browser capabilities.

If you are a com­plete new­bie to the web and have no com­mon sense (like the fact that peo­ple want pages to load fast), then yes, get this book. If, on the other hand, you aren’t a com­plete idiot, skip the book and spend your time coding.