Binary Fortress Software

In the last few weeks I have had the urge to broaden my skill set. I have started reworking my WordPress URL Rewriter (C++) to improve performance, along with memory usage, and it will be ready for release in the next couple days. Also, I recently purchased a Logitech G15 keyboard (which I’ll be reviewing at a later date) that has an embedded programmable LCD screen. I have written a plugin that I’ll be releasing shortly as well, also written in C++. I feels good to get outside C# once and a while, into the crazy world of unmanaged code. It’s like the wild west of coding. You have complete freedom, but you’d better know how to use that freedom, or you’ll end up creating a leaky, buggy, creaky old piece of unmaintainable code. Working in C++ again has been great, but I have felt the urge to expand in other, non-coding areas as well. This is where the book review fits in. Since I take the bus to work, I figured there must be a more productive way to spend my 30 minute bus ride than listening to music. With that thought in mind, I jumped onto the Amazon website and grabbed up 3 recommended books.

The first book I decided to read is called Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug, and it was a great read. This is the second edition of the book, and was updated and released in 2006 to provide more up-to-date advice than the first edition. The great thing about this book is how technologically independent it is. It doesn’t matter if you write web applications in ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails or straight up HTML – this book will apply to you. The only mention of a specific web related technology is the few bits on CSS, but it’s pretty light. The book’s chapters flow together in a logical order, and all of them contain little gems of advice. I have been doing web development for many years now, so some of the information seemed obvious, but the chapters were full of little bits of wisdom that seemed to fill in the gaps. The one chapter that provided the most useful information for me was the chapter on usability testing. I have never had the opportunity to work for a company who provides a budget for usability testing. One of the little gems from this chapter is this:

After you’ve worked on a site for even a few weeks, you can’t see it freshly anymore. You know too much. The only way to find out if it really works it to test it.

This is so true, and not just for software development. I have always held the belief that you need a second set of eyes to review your work on a regular basis just to let you know if you’re still on track. You get so close to the interface design and you’re so used to using it that you can’t see the glaring errors anymore.

The next great chapter was the one titled “The Home Page is Beyond Your Control”. This paragraph pretty much sums it up:

Everybody wants a piece of it. Since it’s the one page that almost every visitor sees – and the only page some visitors will see – things that are prominently promoted on the Home page tend to get significantly greater traffic. As a result, the Home page is the waterfront property of the Web: It’s the most desirable real estate, and there’s a very limited supply. Everybody who has a stake in the site wants to get a promo or link to their section on the Home page, and the turf battles for Home page visibility can be fierce.

Does this sound familiar? Where I work it’s a constant struggle to try and reduce the volume of content on our home page, and one that I rarely win. It’s nice to know that at least Steve Krug is in my corner.

The “Usability as Common Courtesy” chapter provides a summarized list of “dos” and “don’ts” for web design. I’m not going to re-post the list here, but I will post the biggest “don’t” on his list. This is one that frequently bothers me when shopping online.

Don’t hide information that I want. [...] Some sites hide pricing information in hopes of getting users so far into the process that they’ll feel vested in it by the time they experience the “sticker shock”.

I can’t count the number of times I have priced out some items on a website, added them to my virtual cart, then proceeded to the checkout. At this point, the most important thing to me is how much they are going to charge me for shipping. Some websites providing a shipping cost estimator at this point, the poorly designed ones don’t. Some sites I have been on want to have you create an account, collect all of your personal information including all the payment information, then they show you the shipping cost on the final payment confirmation screen. It’s usually at this point that I realize why they waited so long, it’s because they’re trying to rip me off. All sites should just be up-front about their shipping costs. Most of the time if a site won’t tell me how much shipping is going to cost up-front I won’t give them any information to find out.

The 11th and final chapter in the book is titled “Accessibility, Cascading Style Sheets, and You”. Accessibility is something that I don’t have as much experience with as I should (or would like to). One of the first tests he does for accessibility in this chapter is to increase the font size of the current web page. If the page breaks, it fails the test. Very simple first test. He goes on to talk about other testing methods and other ways to provide better accessibility. I have never had the privilege of watching someone use a screen reader to browse the web, but he provides this bit of information to help you imagine how they do it:

Screen-reader users scan with their ears. [...] They listen to the first few words of a link or line of text. If it does not seem relevant they move quickly to the next link, next line, next heading, next paragraph. Where a sighted user might find a keyword by scanning over the entire page, a blind user may not hear that keyword if it is not at the beginning of a link or line of text.

It is so important to have relevant information contained in your links. Instead of something like:
[Click here] to buy shoes.

You could try something like:
[Buy Shoes]

It’s more simple, to the point, and someone with a screen reader will immediately know that it’s a link to buy shoes. Everyone wins.

Overall this book was brief (just 185 pages) but very concise. The pages were full of right and wrong design examples, along with example scripts to use when performing usability testing. The book was easy to read and the information was easy to digest. I think it is aimed at more of a novice, or someone unfamiliar with proper web design principles, but the information it shares can benefit everyone. I would gladly recommend this book to someone starting out in web design, or someone interested in setting up their first usability test.