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A review by aqword
The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web by Jesse James Garrett
3.0
Perhaps the most pleasantly surprising thing about this book was realizing part-way through that it's a theory book. For the most part, I can't abide theory. I prefer writings that demonstrate their ideas with concrete principles, so I was pleased to realize while reading this book that I hadn't even noticed I was reading theory. The prose style is clear and concise enough that the pages fly by despite their abstract content.
Garrett considers five overlapping planes in website design: the surface, skeleton, structure, scope, and strategy (20-21). I initially interpreted these as roughly corresponding to the roles of graphic designer, interaction designer, information architect, developer, and business analyst, with a project manager overseeing all five, but found that Garret further subdivided each plane based on whether the website was approached from a functional standpoint or information standpoint to create a different set of labels (27-9). To me, the most interesting aspect of this division was his decision to place interaction design and information architecture on the same level (the structure plane) with interface design and navigation design overlaying these elements. I had assumed that interaction design overlaid information architecture, but he makes a good case for treating interaction design as a functional interpretation of the structure and information architecture as an information model of the structure, placing them at equivalent levels in the hierarchy.
Some more things this book says are:
* UX design considers how the user interacts with traditional aesthetic design and functional design. Instead of just making the product aesthetically appealing or possible to use, UX makes it easy to use (7-8).
* Conversion rate is more effective than sales at measuring the user experience because sales can depend on the external factor of marketing (15).
* The key to defining good product objectives is to balance between general and specific, being general enough to show what problems the product will solve, yet specific enough to give some sense of how it will solve them (38).
* Although many people think of brand identity in visual terms, it is important to specify at the level of product objectives how the brand identity ties into intended conceptual association and emotional reactions of the users (38).
* Possible requirements should be evaluated based on a combination of product needs, user requirements, and feasibility of implementation (75).
* Designing the information architecture from the top down can overlook some aspects of the content, while designing it from the bottom up can fit the existing content too closely (90).
* In a design comp, the term comp can signify a composite of the underlying layers of design hierarchy (148). I had always just assumed that comp was short for composition, but it makes the artifact more scientific to view it as a composite.
Garrett considers five overlapping planes in website design: the surface, skeleton, structure, scope, and strategy (20-21). I initially interpreted these as roughly corresponding to the roles of graphic designer, interaction designer, information architect, developer, and business analyst, with a project manager overseeing all five, but found that Garret further subdivided each plane based on whether the website was approached from a functional standpoint or information standpoint to create a different set of labels (27-9). To me, the most interesting aspect of this division was his decision to place interaction design and information architecture on the same level (the structure plane) with interface design and navigation design overlaying these elements. I had assumed that interaction design overlaid information architecture, but he makes a good case for treating interaction design as a functional interpretation of the structure and information architecture as an information model of the structure, placing them at equivalent levels in the hierarchy.
Some more things this book says are:
Spoiler
* UX design considers how the user interacts with traditional aesthetic design and functional design. Instead of just making the product aesthetically appealing or possible to use, UX makes it easy to use (7-8).
* Conversion rate is more effective than sales at measuring the user experience because sales can depend on the external factor of marketing (15).
* The key to defining good product objectives is to balance between general and specific, being general enough to show what problems the product will solve, yet specific enough to give some sense of how it will solve them (38).
* Although many people think of brand identity in visual terms, it is important to specify at the level of product objectives how the brand identity ties into intended conceptual association and emotional reactions of the users (38).
* Possible requirements should be evaluated based on a combination of product needs, user requirements, and feasibility of implementation (75).
* Designing the information architecture from the top down can overlook some aspects of the content, while designing it from the bottom up can fit the existing content too closely (90).
* In a design comp, the term comp can signify a composite of the underlying layers of design hierarchy (148). I had always just assumed that comp was short for composition, but it makes the artifact more scientific to view it as a composite.