Review: Defensive Design for the Web · 700 words posted 03/26/2004 05:14 PM
Basecamp, a web-based project management tool, is one of the most elegant, affordable, and easy-to-use pieces of software I’ve encountered on or off the web. When I browse a site this good, I often think “I wish I could pick that guy’s brain.”
In this case, I could: Matthew Linderman and Jason Fried of 37signals, the web design and usability specialists, have distilled their knowledge of user interaction into Defensive Design for the Web: How to Improve Error Messages, Help, Forms, and Other Crisis Points (New Riders, 2004). As the authors describe:
No one’s perfect. Let’s admit it: Things will go wrong online. No matter how carefully you design a site, no matter how much testing you do, customers will still encounter problems. Sites must plan for these inevitable breakdowns with defensive design… By improving defensive design, online businesses can help customers recover from mishaps—increasing conversion rates and customer loyalty in the process.
37signals provides 40 guidelines for helping your users manage crisis points, including:
- Eliminate the need for back-and-forth clicking
- Highlight either required or optional fields
- Accept entries in all common formats
- Don’t block content with ads
Each guideline is supported by multiple online examples. Simply listing the guidelines doesn’t do the book justice: you might be tempted to respond, “Well, that’s just common sense.” But many sites violate even the simplest of the guidelines.
Defensive Design gets right what so many other computer books do not: it is brief, free from jargon, and doesn’t attempt to browbeat you with a list of inflexible rules. The author’s tone of humble, informed guidance brings to mind Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, and Defensive Design clearly belongs on the same shelf as Mr. Krug’s usability classic. As good as the book is, though, it has two real flaws.
First, the book relies on “As if analogy” sidebars to compare online contingency design to offline situations. Too often, the sidebars are distractors, and simply highlight the differences between online and offline transactions. For example, Guideline 28 is “Don’t force registration.” In other words, web sites shouldn’t force customers to uniquely identify themselves before receiving assistance. Here’s the “As if” analogy:
Why is this bad? It’s as if I call the phone company to report a problem with my service. To receive assistance, however, I must first sign up for their customer mailing list.
But that’s not a precise comparison—in fact, there already is a real-world analogy: you won’t get support service from a phone company without providing your uniquely identifying information. Increasingly, you can’t even get pre-sales information from a phone company without providing uniquely identifying information. That may be a nuisance, but it’s common offline practice, and the inexact analogy simply muddies the otherwise reasonable online guideline: don’t force registration.
Second, and worse, the book is printed in black and white: the screenshots are small, low contrast, and difficult to read. This wouldn’t be such a nuisance if the screenshots were on the periphery of the authors’ message, but they’re not! Instead, the screenshots are central to each of the guidelines. Here’s a sample Yahoo! form used to support Guideline 11, “Explicitly state limits to characters.” (The screenshot was taken from a PDF at the book’s companion web site, but the paper version is almost as murky).
You might think color doesn’t matter to a book like this, but consider the authors’ second guideline: “Use color, icons, and text to clearly highlight and explain the problem area.”
In defense of Linderman and Fried, the decision to publish a book in black and white is made by the publisher, New Riders, not the authors. Four years ago, the same publisher released Don’t Make Me Think—a book of similar length, scope, and goals—in glorious color on thick paper stock for $35 (sample screenshot, above, taken from the author’s site). Perhaps times are different, with publishers and purchasers poorer alike, but I would happily pay $35 for a full color version of Defensive Design. You should too: write to Jennifer Eberhardt, New Riders Senior Development Editor, and ask her to publish a second edition in color.
The bottom line: Defensive Design is a bargain at $25. But a book this good deserves to be better.
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Buy this book from Amazon.
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