Some good insights, but not what I was looking for. I'd hoped there would be more advice in how to deal with with big chunks of content. Chapter 5 deals with "The art of NOT writing for the web", but for me personally it was too short. [b:Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works|1135441|Letting Go of the Words Writing Web Content that Works|Janice G. Redish|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348260090s/1135441.jpg|1122676] seems to be more suited for what I need but the sample chapters don't impress me that mucht ( )

Its concise and tells you what you need to know. It's all obvious but obvious things tend to fly when you are so concentrated in making your first couple of websites ( )

Where should I even start? This book is a bomb. I love it and every time I pick it up and browse through it, I learn something new and cool about usability.

The main points are that your website/project should be:

*Useful
*Learnable
*Memorable
*Effective
*Efficient
*Desirable
*Delightful
To me, the book is also funny. Some of the examples of what not to do are hilarious. Like the discussion between the manager, marketing, developer, and designer about pull-down menus. Or comparing bad navigation to going to a store and wandering aimlessly for the stuff you need and nobody being there to help you so you eventually leave.

One chapter at the end is about usability and how to test your site for it. Although I have not done it myself, you can use the points there to find issues with your site.

There are plenty of simple examples from everyday life that describe similarity to websites, therefore it is so user-friendly to us non-designers by trade.

Readability: 5
Scope: 5
Depth: 4
Format: 5
Clarity: 5 ( )

There are some segments that are showing their age but for the most part Krug has a lot of sharp, insightful commentary about design here. ( )

I am a programmer. My idea of a beautiful UI is Nethack. My idea of a great UX is grep. (Hint: You probably don't want me designing a UI, ever.)

But writing a web site, even a dynamic one, is something I have to do as part of my profession, and if nobody else takes on that task, I guess it's on me. And we as developers need empathy in general, let alone an understanding of what is the way that will make as wide an audience feel happiest when using our product (and enabling people to do with what I make what everything that I hope it offers them.)

--

I was designing a webapp to learn some new technology and see if I could get even an amateur hobby web/mobile application under my belt, and was looking for something as thoughtless as "this is how all apps should be designed. Always make them look like this. Always have these pieces here" and so on.

This was the second book I read. The first, Joel Spolsky's [b:User Interface Design for Programmers|41790|User Interface Design for Programmers|Joel Spolsky|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1385163404s/41790.jpg|41306] was good at at beating into my head the kind of values I needed to approach this from an empathy point of view.

This book gets more into the nuts and bolts, even if at an introductory level. It's the kind of book I'm going to need to own and keep around me as I try to do something very foreign to me, design a web page, and keep referencing to make sure I'm sticking to the framework of though as I'm doing what I'm doing ... when in doubt, skim over the book and reassert that I'm on the right path.

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I probably haven't digested the material enough to recite it back, but basically, it gives me a little bit of a basic layout for how I should structure an app, but also builds into models of how I should anticipate the user engaging with what I make, how they will scan the app and hunt for things in very different ways than I think when engaging with software, and so on. It gives you practical thoughts on how to think of your product as a tool that people are only using because they want to achieve something and maybe your tool will help them do that.

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So yeah, my big recommendation is that if you're clueless about UX like me, you'll want to have this book around to reorient yourself around repeatedly, like little mantras and compasses. ( )