Want to learn how to create great user experiences on today's Web? In this book, UI experts Bill Scott and Theresa Neil present more than 75 design patterns for building web interfaces that provide rich interaction. Distilled from the authors' years of experience at Sabre, Yahoo!, and Netflix, these best practices are grouped into six key principles to help you take advantage of the web technologies available today. With an entire section devoted to each design principle, Designing Web Interfaces helps you:

• Make It Direct-Edit content in context with design patterns for In Page Editing, Drag & Drop, and Direct Selection

• Keep It Lightweight-Reduce the effort required to interact with a site by using In Context Tools to leave a "light footprint"

• Stay on the Page-Keep visitors on a page with overlays, inlays, dynamic content, and in-page flow patterns

• Provide an Invitation-Help visitors discover site features with invitations that cue them to the next level of interaction

• Use Transitions-Learn when, why, and how to use animations, cinematic effects, and other transitions

• React Immediately-Provide a rich experience by using lively responses such as Live Search, Live Suggest, Live Previews, and more

Designing Web Interfaces illustrates many patterns with examples from working websites. If you need to build or renovate a website to be truly interactive, this book gives you the principles for success.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 12 Ratings

An Embarrassment of Riches - 2009-07-10
Reviewer Rating:
Scott is a/the genius behind Netflix and Yahoo!'s interfaces, so I got this book to figure out how to make my web interface programming work more professional.

However, much of what I've read here goes against the spirit of the design I was taught to do in grad school. For example, Netflix/Yahoo! make complex designs that are highly functional for expert users, and at-least reasonably usable for intermediate users. These designs feature transitions which use fades, transparent controls which only become visible when a user hovers, and dueling interfaces which allow power-users to move at a different speed than weaker users, etc.

By comparison, my grad program emphasizes designing for readability, learnability and with a singular notion of organizational principles structuring content in such a way that it is accessible to humans, search engines, and user agents (speech synthesis for visually impaired users). In Designing Web Interfaces, this perspective is consistently swept aside in the quest to build "rich interactions" at the expense of these peripheral users.

The result for me of this encounter with "Designing Web Interfaces" has been a renewed appreciation of how hard it is to make interface design choices. So often design is a question of framing, which establishes who the audience is, what the goals are, and what standards to use for a product.

I think at best, this book offers insight into future trends of professional design -- what Scott calls "rich interactions". However, I have a feeling that I'll always be more on the novice/disabled/user-agent user's side, leaning towards standard-based and user-centered designs, no matter what these captains of industry are cooking up.

A good overview, but could be better - 2009-07-24
Reviewer Rating:
Provides a good overview of the many interface options in use today. However, accessibility is generally not addressed, so you would have to assess this yourself for each option. Also, the screenshots could have been marked up to show the steps in the interactions more clearly, rather than just successive screenshots.

Good as a reference book - 2009-10-08
Reviewer Rating:
I was waiting for more from this book. It's nothing more than an reference book on some design patterns.

Super detailed, very informative - 2009-09-27
Reviewer Rating:
I really enjoyed Designing Web Interfaces. If you plan on making a move from being just a visual designer to a user interface designer this is definitely a must read, more details than you imagine there could be about web interfaces!

Web Interfaces - 2009-08-28
Reviewer Rating:
Reviewer: Dave Roman, GCPCUG member


This book has 14 chapters, but they are only sub divisions of a different type of classification. The book is about interaction design on the web. They have divided this book up into six principles and since they took this approach I am going to review the principles.

Principle One - Make It Direct
What does that mean? This is covered in three chapters. They discuss direct in-page editing of content, moving objects around directly with the mouse (drag and drop), and applying actions to directly selected objects.

Principle Two - Keep It Lightweight
This area discusses Contextual Tools

Principle Three - Stay on the Page
Here they discuss ways to keep the user on the page including overlays, Inlays, Virtual Pages and Process Flow

Principal Four - Provide an Invitation
This area talks about providing an invitation to the user in a number of forms. Static invitations are offered on the page using visual techniques to invite interaction. Dynamic invitations come into play in response to what and where the user is interacting.

Principal Five - Use Transitions
This area could be entitled "Pay Attention" because it IS about getting your attention using movement and transition. They discuss transition patterns like "brighten and dim", "expand and collapse", "Self-Healing Fade", "Animation" and "spotlight".

Then they go to the purpose of transition. What is the reason for using these powerful effects and where they are most effective.

Principle Six - React Immediately
This is all about what happens immediately after each interaction with the system. There should be an immediate reaction paired with the user's action. The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable time and is called Latency Reduction.

They first talk about lookup patterns and then feedback patterns.

The web is constantly changing, so the authors provide sites to keep you up to date, one of which is http://designingwebinterfaces.com

It's a long book, but does a good job explaining what takes place in an interactive website. This is not a coding book, but more like a combination of the psychology of a web site and how to use this knowledge to make it easier for the user and also make it easier to buy a product or find the information they are looking for.

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