Book Review: “designing the obvious - a common sense approach to web application design ” - robert hoekman, jr.
I don’t own many books with color pictures. They’re almost never worth the extra money/time-to-market. designing the obvious by robert hoekman, jr. is an exception to this rule. It’s hard to classify this book - it’s certainly not a “how-to”, nor is it a reference - there’s nearly no code in it. It’s not a design book - there are no design tenets either. It’s more of a “user interaction” book, combined with some well thought out process guidelines for designing for the web.
Chapter List
- Defining the Obvious
- Understanding Users, Then Ignore Them
- Build Only What Is Absolutely Necessary
- Support the Users’s Mental Model
- Turn Beginners Into Intermediates, Immediately
- Handle Errors Wisely
- Design for Uniformity, Consistency and Meaning
- Reduce and Refine
- Don’t Innovate When You Can Elevate
I’d sum up this book in the following phrase: “Developers and Designers: Don’t settle for the easy solution, go the extra mile, figure out what is the right way to do something, and do that. Then check your work, and refine as needed”.
Hoekman is adamant about implementing solutions that eliminate “Implementation Models”. Implementation Models are facets of the application that reveal the implementation to the user. Allowing these into the application disturbs the “Mental Model” that the user has about the task being performed.
Throughout the book, the author stresses the iterative development, applying techniques multiple times to arrive at the best interaction for the task. His reference to Kaizen and 5S are interesting in terms of interaction design, as well as for traditional design and development.
Many of the chapters parallel similar ideas from “Getting Real” (”Ignore Users”, “More features = More frustration”). I think more and more organizations are realizing that every added feature represents a cost. These costs appear small at first, but only because they’re like icebergs, most of the cost is hidden. Incurring these costs up front in an application is similar to compounding interest - the later you wait to incur the cost (implement the feature), the less it will cost over time.
Poka-yoke (pronounced POH-kah YOH-kay), is the Japanese term for “mistake-proofing”
The coverage of Poka-yoke in this book was my first exposure to the term. Hoekman discusses at length the term, and it’s implementation in everyday devices. He then covers it’s use in web applications, and the benefits it can bring. Many of the ideas and techniques to implement Poka-yoke in web applications are tedius, but will obviously raise the user experience and cannot be ignored.
There are countless links and external references throughout this book. My only qualm is that those references are inconvenient to lookup while reading the book, and hard to find once you’ve covered the material. An appendix listing (by chapter) the links and references would be a nice addition to an already useful book.