This thin book often feels like a hurried rehash of Hoekman's earlier book, Designing the Obvious. Both have the same format: A series of examples of common web interface elements (e.g. log-in forms, shopping carts, navigation bars) and how they can be tweaked slightly to prove the user with a smoother experience.

It's an enjoyable and quick read, but unless your project happens to be using any of the exact elements in the book, what's important is the intuition that you develop from reading Hoekman, the desire to think just outside of the box of standard web design patterns to make things better for your users. It should only take one book to teach that intuition, not two.

This book might be worth skimming for the handful of novel ideas it contains, but I was hoping for something more cohesive and original.

I really like Robert Hoekman, Jr. 's Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action, his follow up to 2007's Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design.

Why?

It's a quick read (I finished it in three sittings) that is filled with practical insights about building usable web applications. I also like the author's philosphy on designing web interfaces- simple, direct to the point and user-centric.

The book reads like a step-be-step manual on how to design specific elements. Hoekman also makes several sound recommendations, although I don't necessarily agree with them 100%. For example, there is a part where he recommends the elimination of "Welcome" text in lieu for instructions, since he believes users want something to do with the website. But I think that there is still some utility to the Welcome message in terms of setting expectations for the users.

The chapter I liked most in the book is the one where he discusses form design. I used to design forms in a rather generic way, but the book offers very good suggestions on how to make forms, long and short, error-free and easier to fill out.

Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action is good for designers who don't have the time to scour through websites for design tips on various design patterns for blogs, dashboards and AJAX components. It's also technology agnostic so even if newer technologies come along, the book is still solid.

Promising book with a great selection of topics and a lot of nice examples. The book is also quite readable, though the down-to-earth writing style sometimes gets out of hand. Most of the presented solutions are good, but some perhaps less so: For someone who claims he wants to "leave nothing to chance", it's disappointing that he rarely bothers to back his statements up with more than "I'm in the camp who believes". This may be fine if you are a Zen master or are designing your personal blog, but I'd have appreciated some mention of existing usability studies where relevant, and some discussion on how to evaluate your own design decisions.

This is a follow on book by the author of the popular Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design. The author is a web designer who has started his own company. His advice seems to me to be very practical and valuable.

He starts with some basics on layout and design continuity to form a more positive impression. He presents some advice on what to do and not to do when it comes to web site navigation. He talks about content patterns such as trigger words, making the text easy to scan, and labeling. He weighs in with his seasoned opinions on such popular GUI innovations as tag clouds, auto-completion, streaming video, advanced search criteria, paging through search results, syndication, and predictive market style rating systems.

He also gives advice on mitigating goal conversion problems such as detailed form entry abandonment and resistance to registration.

I get the feeling that he has a pet peeve about sites that make it easy to register yet hard to unregister as he devotes a whole chapter on letting them go.

I recommend this book and Designing the Obvious to web designers, and burgeoning IA's . These two books combined take seemingly daunting but painfully simple interfaces and functionality and turn them into easy cheezy solutions that are plug-n-play ready to go! No matter what type of website you are working on, these core pieces allow you to embrace to basic in order to excel in the complex. Such a breeze to read, and fun too! Robert, you're amazing. If I could ever work with you, it would be a dream come true! Thank you for all the time and energy you put into these books to help make the rest of our jobs much easier!