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The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web
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Author: Jesse James Garrett
List Price: $29.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0735712026
Publisher: New Riders (11 October, 2002)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 3,178
Average Customer Rating: 4.05 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 5 out of 5
Great Book; Misleading Title
Like many negative Amazon reviews, some detractors of this book seem to object to the fact that it is this book and not something else. In this case they may not be entirely unfair. If you are looking for advanced techniques in web design you won't find them in Garrett's book. If, however, you are looking for a good framework for thinking about design strategy--for your own thinking, for explaining things to clients, or for students--you will find this book indispensable. It is short, sweet, and straightforward. Whether that's good news of bad is something each reader will need to decide.Some complain that The Elements of User Experience does not go deeply enough into a range of user experience issues. This may partially be the fault of the author and the publisher. The value of this book goes well beyond web projects and the "user experience" world. Much of it applies to a variety of design projects. If I were to make a major objection to the book it is not that it is too shallow but that it is conceived of as too narrow. Much of the audience that would find this book to be an important breakthrough would never pick up a book that crams the word "User" into the title twice then gets in two buzz words and says "Web." I don't think this is one of the most important books about user experience or user-centered design. It is, however, a great basic book on design strategy. I hope disappointed people rating it poorly for not being the book they hoped for will not detract from this book finding the wider audience it richly deserves.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Superficial babble
Not worth the paper it is printed on. A superficial treatment of analysis, design and implementation of web sites. After reading 73 pages of content-free material I finally gave up trying to find anything amid the fluff and chucked this one in the trash.
Rating: 3 out of 5
An Introduction to User Interface Design
The book is an introduction text to the field of user interface design. What I found useful in the book is thinking about the user interface as a number of layers and this reminds me of the layer approach used when explaining communication technologies. I've been using a simpler 3 layer model to communicate what is a user interface to non-professionals and that works. However, even knowing that a user interface contains several layers does not help you build a user interface. From my experience, building user interfaces requires synthesis. This is where I found this book lacking, it tells you about the required parts but unfortunately doesn't really help tell you how to put them together. Using a cooking analogy, you have the ingredients for the meal but you are missing the quantities and cooking times. Therefore this book is great to understand what a user interface but it is of limited help to build a user interface.
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