Book Review: Designing the Obvious

Tar­geted at people who have heard the word usab­il­ity but not sure how to pro­ceed fur­ther, Robert Hoek­man, Jr. in his book, Design­ing the Obvi­ous, does a good job of explain­ing usab­il­ity and how to use user-centered design con­cepts in web pro­jects. Stay­ing true to the book’s sub­title of A Com­mon Sense Approach to Web Usab­il­ity, the book explains the vari­ous con­cepts and the­or­ies relat­ing to web usability.

“An obvi­ous design would let me get in, get what I need, and get out without spend­ing any time at all think­ing about how the soft­ware works or work with my data.”

Though some con­cepts are just com­mon sense approaches, it becomes easier for web applic­a­tion design­ers to under­stand why they need to do things a cer­tain way. As the book is well-written with ample examples and screen­shots, this book con­tains many tips and tech­niques to improve cur­rent interfaces.

Design­ing the Obvi­ous by Robert Hoek­man Jr

Chapters and what they talk about

• Defin­ing the Obvious

  Obvi­ous design is the res­ult of a pro­cess that reveals the goals of your users, the con­texts in which they use your sites and soft­ware, and the tasks they really want to achieve.

• Under­stand Users, Then Ignore Them

  People often don’t do what they think they do. They don’t act the way they think they would act. It is import­ant to do user research before starting.

• Build Only What Is Abso­lutely Necessary

  Sim­pli­city is bet­ter. Avoid fea­ture creep and nice-to-have features.

• Sup­port the User’s Men­tal Model

  A user’s men­tal model determ­ines their appre­ci­ation or frus­tra­tion with a product. Design­ing for men­tal mod­els, rather than imple­ment­a­tion mod­els, is the rule to follow.

• Turn Begin­ners Into Inter­me­di­ates, Immediately

  Don’t design for experts or begin­ners. Design for per­petual intermediates.

• Handle Errors Wisely

The best way to handle errors is to pre­vent them from ever occur­ring. Error mes­sages that do not provide use­ful inform­a­tion do not help users. They hurt users.

• Design for Uni­form­ity, Con­sist­ency, and Meaning

  Design pat­terns are a power­ful tool when try­ing to main­tain con­sist­ent user exper­i­ences across mul­tiple inter­ac­tions within a single applic­a­tion and across mul­tiple applications.

• Reduce and Refine

  Clut­ter dimin­ishes a user’s abil­ity to form a work­able men­tal model by crowding the import­ant pieces of a screen in with unim­port­ant ones. Clut­ter makes it more dif­fi­cult for new users to become inter­me­di­ate users by put­ting things in the way of the learn­ing pro­cess. Clut­ter makes it hard to see the design in the design.

• Don’t Innov­ate When You Can Elevate

  Elev­at­ing the user exper­i­ence is not about adding fea­tures to make an applic­a­tion stand out from the crowd. It’s about tak­ing things away until the heart of the applic­a­tion is allowed to shine through.

If any­thing that was lack­ing in this book, it was a chapter on access­ib­il­ity, which most web developers find them­selves hor­rible at. Per­son­ally, I felt this book, along with Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, must be made com­puls­ory read­ing and I would rate it as 4/5.