What you will learn:

Defensive Design for the Web contains 40 guidelines that basically revolve around three things:

• Clearly and politely telling your web site’s visitors what to do and/or what to expect.
• Avoiding things that cause frustrations, and providing helpful “help” wherever and whenever they need it.
• Helping your visitors recover from different kinds of errors and dead-ends.

Prerequisites:

A brain and some common sense (really).

Target Audience:

Owners, developers and designers of Web Sites, especially e-commerce sites.

Clarity:

The book is written well in an easy-to-understand English, and almost every single guideline in the book is accompanied with at least one screen shot. In fact, the book relies on images for illustrations to the point that, in many pages, images take more space than their paragraph(s).

The authors will show you numerous screen shots of real web sites and comment on what’s wrong, what’s right and why. And it works really well.

The Good:

• All of the guidlines are presented in a very simple way with numerous examples.
• The examples used in the book are from real sites.
• The book will help you convert more visitors into customers if you run e-commerce sites.
• A learn-by-example book.
• a good heads-up about Web sites’ usability. Nothing new though.

The Bad:

• Usability guidelines presented in this book aren’t about web sites in general. Most of them are about e-commerce web sites.
• Screen shots aren’t in color.
• The way guidelines are presented might feel repetitive after a while, since almost all chapters follow the same style.
• Some guidelines might be too obvious (depending on your expertise).

Bottom line:

If you’ve already read Don’t Make Me Think, and need to read more about usability, then get this book. Otherwise, read the former.