Book review: Defensive Design for the Web
Any self-respective web developer is well-aware of the achievements of 37signals, creators of Basecamp and the extremely popular Ruby on Rails development framework. Having already read and thoroughly enjoyed their web application development manifesto, Getting Real, I was excited to get my hands on 37signalers Matthew Linderman’s and Jason Fried’s 2004 book on web usability, Defensive Design for the Web: How to Improve Error Messages, Help, Forms and Other Crisis Points. I’m also a big fan of New Riders books, so the bar was set high.
While this book contains excellent information about user-friendly design, I was disappointed when I finished it. Physically, the book itself is pleasing enough, clocking in at 236 pages with a nice, easy-to-flip-through binding, but Defensive Design for the Web could have been released as a PDF of about a quarter of the size. From an environmental point of view, the book is a bit of a waste of paper: many pages have content that only fills the top third of the page. (I guess this is good if you’re someone who likes to write notes right on the pages of your books.) Defensive Design for the Web is extremely repetitive, with an excessive number of real-world examples that simply repeat what the guidelines already stated.
The guidelines presented in this book (forty in all) are dead-on, and designers and developers should certainly heed Linderman’s and Fried’s sound advice, but if you can get your hands on the complete table of contents, I can’t see a real reason to buy this book. Seriously, just go to Amazon.com, print out the table of contents, and you have all you need to brush up on your web usability skills.
