Book Reviews: User Experience and Web Standards

— Published December 15th, 2004  |  by David Moore

Web design has developed in a piecemeal and ragged fashion since the mid-90s, powered by excitement, greed and ignorance.

In the past, graphic designers, programmers and entrepreneurs formed an unholy alliance, and thousands of websites appeared (some of them were even pretty good). But the basis on which these sites were built was unreliable and inconsistent, leaving the users out of the loop, and forcing developers to make HTML do things it was never intended to do to achieve workable designs.

Things have fortunately changed, and two recent books suggest a new approach to design and development that will make things easier and better for developers, clients and users.

'Designing with Web Standards' by Jeffrey Zeldman outlines the chaotic way in which many sites are still being built, and traces a path to a more consistent and effective development approach.

Currently, many sites are built using tables for layout, and a toxic mix of scripts, sliced and diced graphics and browser-sniffing to try and make things work and look OK in different browsers. Acessibility and portability are compromised - if you want to use that content on a PDA or a wireless device, for example, you have to start again from scratch.

Zeldman argues persuasively that the new generation of standards-compliant browsers (from IE5/Mac and IE6/Win onwards, including Opera, Firefox and Safari, amongst others) allows a different approach.

Using cascading style sheets (CSS) for layout as well as formatting, and producing pages in XHTML with clear semantic markup means the one site works equally well in all browsers, supports users with disabilities, and is much easier to modify and update.

The book isn't a comprehensive guide to CSS and XHTML, but real examples show you the basics and the benefits, and he's honest enough to explore the annoyances and problems with this approach.

But it's a very readable and compelling account of how we should be building sites now, and why it makes much more sense than the former chaotic approach.

By and large, clients don't care how you build their sites, so long as they look OK on their own machine (just pray they're not using Netscape Navigator 4). But even if they can't tell the difference, if you build using web standards, things will be more straightforward for you, and much better for the users.

But standards won't help you plan the strategy and architecture for a good site. That's where Jesse James Garrett's 'The Elements of User Experience' comes in. Based on his great work for web consultancy Adaptive Path, Garrett shows how planning the structure on the back of an envelope and then jumping straight into the visual design of the pages will result in a disaster of a site.

Breaking down the elements of a good site into 5 areas - strategy, scope, structure, skeleton and surface - he outlines how careful planning and research before site construction begins will make for a much more effective and successful site.

It sounds obvious, but having seen how many sites are designed (especially by people with a graphics or programming background), taking the time to ask 'what are we trying do with this site?' and 'who will be using it, and what are they looking for?' is seldom done.

Similarly, planning site architecture and page layout on paper, and revising the design, navigation and interface carefully is much more effective than pulling an existing design off the shelf and asking the client what their favorite color is.

It used to be argued that the web was such a young medium that no constent approaches to best practice had been developed, and everyone was free to do things in their own way. Fortunately, conventions and standards now exist to ensure quality and effectiveness. Design firms and internal teams no longer have to make things up as they go along, and those that continue to do so are letting down their employers and their visitors.

These two books offer good places to start in making sure that we're doing the best job we can.

• 'Designing with Web Standards' by Jeffrey Zeldman
• 'The Elements of User Experience' by Jesse James Garrett