The Design of Sites


PATTERNS, PRINCIPLES, AND PROCESSES FOR CRAFTING A CUSTOMER-CENTERED WEB EXPERIENCE BY DOUGLAS K. VAN DUYNE, JAMES A. LANDAY, AND JASON I. HONG

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Resources

Part I: Foundation of Web Site Design

Chapter 1: Customer-Centered Web Design

Books, Research Papers, and News Articles

Bias, R., and D. Mayhew. (1994) Cost-Justifying Usability. Sand Diego, CA: Academic Press.

This book is a collection of essays that describe various methods and techniques for quantitatively showing how usability affects the bottom line.

Creative Good. (1999) Holiday '99 E-Commerce: Bridging the $6 Billion Customer Experience Gap. (http://www.creativegood.com/research.html)

This report reviews several of the top e-commerce Web sites, pointing out how simple problems prevented visitors from completing basic tasks, and how these problems could affect the bottom line.

Creative Good. (2000) Holiday 2000 E-Commerce Report. (http://www.creativegood.com/research.html)

This report discusses the results of informal usability evaluations on several top e-commerce Web sites.

Dembeck, C. (2000, January 11) Report: B2B Web sites fail usage test. E-Commerce Times [online]. (http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/2183.html)

In this news article on a Forrester Report, "Why Web Sites Fail," one of the results described here is that when customers have a bad experience on a Web site, they tell an average of ten other people.

Moore, G. (1999) Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers (rev. ed.). New York: HarperBusiness.

The author describes how high-tech products sell well initially, mainly to a technically literate customer base, but then hit a lull as marketing professionals try to cross the chasm to mainstream buyers. Crossing the Chasm was a mile-stone in high-tech marketing when it was first released in 1991.

NetRaker Corporation. (2000, April) EShopping Research Study. (http://www.netraker.com/nrinfo/company/20000907.asp)

his study looks at the factors driving repeat visits and purchases at online shopping sites. It found that although a few Web sites offer a great customer experience, there is still plenty of room for improvement. In a comparison study between Yahoo! Shopping, Amazon.com and AOL Shopping, not one firm scored over an 8.02 on a scale of 0 to 10 when rated by consumers. The lowest score was below 6.5. By comparison, when leaders in offline industries are evaluated on the key components that drive repeat visits and satisfaction, we see scores typically in the high 8s and low 9s.

Tedeschi, B. (1999, August 30) Good Web site design can lead to healthy sales. New York Times E-Commerce Report. (http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/08/cyber/commerce/30commerce.html)

This article reports on IBM’s efforts to redesign its Web site and on how sales increased after overall usability was improved.

Web Sites

Creative Good: http://creativegood.com and
goodexperience.com: http://www.goodexperience.com

Creative Good is a strategy firm that helps clients focus on the customer experience. Goodexperience.com is a Web log by Mark Hurst, the founder and president of Creative Good. He provides insights about what is right and wrong with the Web experience today, as well as an occasional tidbit about technology-related issues. The site is updated fairly often, but you may find it more useful to get the weekly e-mail updates instead.

useit.com: Jakob Nielsen’s Website: http://www.useit.com

Jakob Nielsen is one of the best-known Web personalities today, for his hardline stance in favor of usability. useit.com is his Web site, where he publishes Alertbox, a biweekly newsletter on Web-related usability issues.

WebWord.com: http://www.webword.com

WebWord.com is a great site for those of us who want to keep up with news about Web design and usability but do not have the time to do our own surfing. The WebWord team highlights the best news articles from a bunch of other Web sites.

Chapter 2: Making the Most of Web Design Patterns

Books, Research Papers, and News Articles

Alexander, C., S. Ishikawa, and M. Silverstein. (1977) A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. New York: Oxford University Press.

This book originally introduced the idea of patterns in the field of architecture. Alexander has inspired many, including the authors of the book you have in hand, with his idea that patterns could be an effective way of doing design, and a way that customers could express their needs and desires.

Borchers, J. (2001) A Pattern Approach to Interaction Design. Chichester, England: Wiley.

This was the first book to bring patterns to user interface design. The Web site for this book, at http://hcipatterns.org, includes research and conferences dealing with patterns.

Fry, J. (2001, August 13) Web shoppers’ loyalty isn’t so crazy after all. Wall Street Journal (http://ebusiness.mit.edu/news/WSJ_Story8-13-01.html)

This article looks at a phenomenon known as cognitive lock-in, in which people find things that are familiar more attractive. One result is that people tend not to shop around as much as economists expect, sticking to retailers they already know, because the time to learn a new interface might not be worth the money that might be saved at a competitor's site.

Gamma, E., R. Helm, R. Johnson, and J. Vlissides. (1995) Design Patterns. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

This book brought the concept of patterns to software design and programming.

Web Sites

Erickson, T. (No date) The Interaction Design Patterns Page. (http://www.pliant.org/personal/Tom_Erickson/InteractionPatterns.html)

This Web site contains resources on pattern languages for interaction design, including pointers to other pattern Web sites and patterns for user interface design.

Tidwell, J. (1999) Common Ground: A Pattern Language for Human–Computer Interface Design. (http://www.mit.edu/~jtidwell/common_ground.html)

This Web site has about 60 patterns targeted at design, running the gamut from content design to navigation to attractiveness.

Welie, M. van. (2001) Web Design Patterns. (http://www.welie.com/patterns)

This Web page lists about 20 patterns for Web design, focusing on navigation, searching, page elements, and e-commerce.

Chapter 3: Knowing Your Customers: Principles and Techniques

Books, Research Papers, and News Articles

Beyer, H., and K. Holtzblatt. (1998) Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.

Beyer and Holtzblatt have written a fantastic book on their process for customer-centered design. As this philosophical and practical guide explains, their process is centered on gaining a deep understanding of customer needs by interviewing people about the way they work, how their organization works, and other constraints. The ideas they present can be used most effectively in the Discovery phase of the Web site development process, when you’re trying to understand who your target audience is and what they want.

Cooper, A. (1999) The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. Indianapolis, IN: Sams.

This book introduces some of the problems with developing user interfaces. Told in narrative form, it also presents techniques to apply for improving the state of the art. In addition, it outlines how to create personas, hypothetical and detailed descriptions of typical customers, and why personas are a useful way of thinking about design. (However, we would argue that the personas should be based on interviews and observations of real people instead of being made up.)

Lewis, C., and J. Rieman. (1994) Task-Centered User Interface Design: A Practical Introduction. (http://hcibib.org/tcuid)

This shareware book on user interface design has some great material on learning about your customers' tasks. Our Web-based banking example is based on their telephone banking example.

Norman, D. (1988) The Psychology of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books.

This book is an eye-opener, and it should be one of the first books you read to learn about design. Norman points out the importance of design and how it affects our everyday lives. You will never look at doorknobs or oven stoves in the same way again. Also published as The Design of Everyday Things.

Palen, L. (1999) Social, individual and technological issues for groupware calendar systems. CHI 1999, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI Letters, 2(1): 17–24. (http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/302979.302982)

(This resource requires access to the ACM Digital Library, at http://www.acm.org/dl.) This study examines calendar systems used by groups, finding that current practices have influenced calendaring habits and technology adoption decisions.

Rubinstein, R., and H. Hersh. (1984) The Human Factor: Designing Computer Systems for People. Bedford, MA: Digital Press.

This early UI design text includes the list of questions we ask when performing a task analysis.

Saffo, P. (1996) The consumer spectrum. In Bringing Design to Software, T. Winograd (Ed.), pp. 87–99. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

This chapter in Winograd’s influential book discusses the fact that consumers' willingness to put up with technology products is measured both by how expensive the technology is and by how much complexity they have to deal with to get the benefits of the product.

Shneiderman, B. (1997) Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human–Computer Interaction (3rd ed.). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

This textbook is an overview of academic research in the field of human–computer interaction and it is a great book about the field in general. In addition, the book’s Web site, at http://www.awl.com/DTUI, has many lecture notes and overviews, and extensive lists of links.

Software

IBM. EZSort. (http://www.ibm.com/ibm/easy/eou_ext.nsf/Publish/410)

EZSort is a free tool that helps designers analyze card-sorting experiments through statistical cluster analysis.

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). WebCAT: Category Analysis Tool. (http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/WebTools/WebCAT/overview.html)

The Web Category Analysis Tool (WebCAT) is a free tool that helps designers set up, run, and analyze card-sorting experiments.

Chapter 4: Involving Customers with Iterative Design

Books, Research Papers, and News Articles

Beyer, H., and K. Holtzblatt. (1998) Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.

See description under Chapter 3—Knowing Your Customers: Principles and Techniques.

Kelley, T. (2001) The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm. New York: Currency/Doubleday.

Skim through the first few chapters, but pay attention when Kelley gets to brainstorming. He describes how the design teams at his company, IDEO, combine their observations of how customers really do things with an extremely creative brainstorming process to create innovative, award-winning products.

McConnell, S. (1996) Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press.

McConnell has a chapter about user interface prototyping in his manual for managing the software development process. Although he focuses entirely on software-based prototypes, he lists many of the same advantages of prototyping, including reduced risk, smaller systems, less complex systems, reduction in creeping requirements, and improved schedule visibility.

Mullet, K., and D. Sano. (1994) Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall/SunSoft Press.

Although this book came out before the Web took off, the information on how to create effective visual interfaces is still valuable. This book is handy in the Refinement and Production phases of the Web site development process, as you build polished and high-fidelity mock-ups of your site.

Nielsen, J. (No date) How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation. (http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_evaluation.html)

This tutorial explains a fast and relatively inexpensive method of finding potential usability errors by using a checklist of usability heuristics.

Nielsen, J. (1993) Usability Engineering. Boston: Academic Press.

This book is great for developing products with usability as the key goal. Issues such as prototyping, iterative design, heuristic evaluation, and usability testing are discussed.

Rettig, M. (1994) Prototyping for tiny fingers. Communications of the ACM, 37(4): 21–27. (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=175288&coll=portal&dl=ACM&CFID=4434504&CFTOKEN=58653636)

(This resource requires access to the ACM Digital Library, at http://www.acm.org/dl.) This is a great article on the motivation behind low-fidelity prototypes, how to make a low-fidelity prototype, and how to run informal usability tests.

Shneiderman, B. (1997) Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human–Computer Interaction (3rd ed.). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

See description under Chapter 3—Knowing Your Customers: Principles and Techniques.

Winograd, T. (1996) Bringing Design to Software. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

This collection of essays takes a broad look at interaction design as a profession. Issues such as the design process, prototyping, art, and people are discussed.

Software

Group for User Interface Research. DENIM. (http://guir.berkeley.edu/denim)

This Web page features DENIM, a sketch-based design tool developed by two of the authors of the book you have in hand for quickly prototyping Web sites.

Chapter 5: Processes for Developing Customer-Centered Sites

Books, Research Papers, and News Articles

Brinck, T., D. Gergle, and S. Wood. (2002) Usability for the Web: Designing Web Sites That Work. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.

This book covers a spectrum of topics, including project management, user needs analysis, information architecture, page layout, writing for the Web, visual design, and usability.

McConnell, S. (1996) Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press.

This book is really about software development, not Web site development. However, it is an excellent resource on project management, and it is full of best practices, common mistakes, and lessons about planning, scheduling, designing, and creating software. If you are interested in the Discovery and Implementation phases of the Web site development process, this is the book for you.

Newman, M. W., and J. A. Landay. (2000, August) Sitemaps, storyboards, and specifications: A sketch of Web site design practice as manifested through artifacts. In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, pp. 263–274. New York. (http://guir.berkeley.edu/projects/denim/pubs/iwd-dis-2000.pdf)

This paper reports on our interviews with Web designers, leading to valuable conclusions about the Web design process, the artifacts, and the deliverables.

Part II: Patterns

Pattern Group A: Site Genres

A1 PERSONAL E-COMMERCE

CNET Builder.com. (No date) E-Business & Strategy. (http://builder.cnet.com/webbuilding/0-3885.html)

This is a valuable resource on the basics of e-commerce, including managing transactions and purchases, business planning, advertising, and so on.

E-Commerce Times: http://www.ecommercetimes.com

E-Commerce Times offers up-to-date news about e-commerce–related issues from financial, marketing, and management perspectives.

Frenkel, K. (2000, June 7) Portals struggle to convert browsers to shoppers. New York Times E-Commerce Report. (http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/06/biztech/technology/07fren.html)

This news article looks at many of the issues confronting e-commerce sites, such as poor usability, lack of support for comparison shopping, privacy, security, and shipping costs. It also discusses the approaches many sites are taking to address these issues.

New York Times, E-Business: http://www.nytimes.com/pages/technology/ebusiness

The New York Times publishes a daily section on e-business, discussing changes in the financial, legal, and technical landscape that affect online commerce. You can also find a weekly e-commerce report, focusing more on issues like Web site design, e-mail, and online marketing. Many of these e-commerce reports are also archived at http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/reference/indexcommerce.html.

Tedeschi, B. (2000, March 29) Now that they’ve come, what can we sell them? New York Times E-Commerce Report. (http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/03/biztech/technology/29tede.html)

This piece examines the common lament that it is easy to attract visitors but difficult to make profitable Web sites.

ZDNet Tech Update: http://www.zdnet.com/ecommerce

ZDNet Tech Update provides news about business strategy and happenings at major technology companies.

A2 NEWS MOSAICS

Pew Internet & American Life Project: http://www.pewinternet.org

This nonprofit initiative conducts and publishes research on "the impact of the Internet on children, families, communities, the work place, schools, health care and civic/political life."

Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. (2000, December 3) Youth Vote Influenced by Online Information: Internet Election News Audience Seeks Convenience, Familiar Names. (http://www.people-press.org/dataarchive)

This discussion of the impact of the Internet on the 2000 U.S. presidential election shows that 33 percent of online customers took advantage of Internet news sources to help make their election decisions.

Shapiro, A. (1999) The Control Revolution: How the Internet Is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know. New York: PublicAffairs.

Shapiro takes a critical look at the Internet and its impact on society, analyzing a broad range of topics, including copyright, free speech, communities, and personalization. One of his most interesting conclusions is that a high degree of personalization may actually be detrimental to society because people will tend to gravitate toward others with similar interests and beliefs, resulting in pockets of society that talk only to themselves but not to each other.

A3 COMMUNITY CONFERENCE

Coate, J. (1998) Cyberspace Innkeeping: Building Online Community. (http://www.sfgate.com/~tex/innkeeping)

This article talks about some of the issues in running online communities, including anonymity, free speech, and leveling the playing field.

Kim, A. J. (2000) Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities. Berkeley, CA: Peachpit Press.

This excellent and practical book provides detailed explanations and case studies of why communities form and how they grow. It also provides suggestions for how to make your site a nurturing place for communities.

Online Community Report: http://www.onlinecommunityreport.com

This twice-monthly newsletter offers the latest in online communities, featuring articles on such topics as distance learning, online auctions, massively multiplayer games, and group collaboration.

Pew Internet & American Life Project: http://www.pewinternet.org

See description under NEWS MOSAICS (A2).

Powazek, D. (2001) Design for Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places. Indianapolis, IN: New Riders.

This book discusses various aspects of online communities, including design, moderation, e-mail, chat, and other issues intrinsic to online communities. It also features interviews with many people who run large online communities.

Preece, J. (2000) Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Sociability. New York: Wiley.

This is one of the best books of academic research on online communities, focusing on issues such as sociability, usability, development, and evaluation.

Rheingold, H. (1998) The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online. (http://www.rheingold.com/texts/artonlinehost.html)

This Web page outlines the role of the Web site in hosting an online community, describing what the goals should be and ways of achieving those goals.

Rheingold, H. (2000) The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (rev. ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

This book chronicles the start and continued growth of the first thriving online community, the WELL. More of a collection of stories than a practical guide, the book still contains many insights about the nature of online communities.

A4 SELF-SERVICE GOVERNMENT

Center for Democracy and Technology: http://www.cdt.org

The Center for Democracy and Technology is devoted to promoting "democratic values and constitutional liberties in the digital age." Its interests include technology with respect to free speech, privacy, surveillance, cryptography, domain names, and international governance.

Federal Computer Week: http://www.fcw.com

Federal Computer Week is a valuable resource for anyone working on information technology for the U.S. government. You will find news articles on a range of technology-related issues, including accessibility, privacy, telecommunications, and training.

FirstGov: http://www.firstgov.gov

FirstGov is the official U.S. government portal, a comprehensive directory containing references to all online information created by the U.S. government.

Hart, P., and R. Teeter. (2000) E-Government: The Next American Revolution. (http://www.excelgov.org/egovpoll/index.htm)

This survey on e-government shows that Americans strongly support electronic government, with the ultimate goals of making government "more accountable to citizens,” providing "greater public access to information," and making a "more efficient and cost-effective government." However, Americans have many concerns about privacy and security.

Pew Internet & American Life Project: http://www.pewinternet.org

See description under NEWS MOSAICS (A2).

A5 NONPROFITS AS NETWORKS OF HELP

Internet Nonprofit Center: http://www.nonprofits.org

The Internet Nonprofit Center provides many links to articles about creating, running, and managing nonprofit organizations. It focuses on logistical, legal, financial, and advertising issues as opposed to Web site design.

Nonprofit Online News: http://news.gilbert.org

Nonprofit Online News provides news about online nonprofits, and links to such topics as use of e-mail, getting grants, and research about nonprofits.

A7 VALUABLE COMPANY SITES

Nielsen, J., and M. Tahir. (2001) Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed. Indianapolis, IN: New Riders.

This text dissects and analyzes 50 different homepages in detail.

Uchitelle, L. (2000, June 7) It’s just the beginning. New York Times E-Commerce Report. (http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/06/biztech/technology/07uchi.html)

This article talks about some of the issues that Honeywell, an established company, dealt with in creating its Web site. It focuses on some of the business-to-business aspects involved, including integrating a number of legacy databases, improving access to suppliers and consumers, and managing inventory.

A8 EDUCATIONAL FORUM

Center for LifeLong Learning and Design: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~l3d

The Center for LifeLong Learning and Design is a group at the University of Colorado at Boulder that researches and theorizes about the "scientific foundations for the construction of intelligent systems that amplify human capabilities."

Computer Support for Collaborative Learning: http://www.cscl-home.org

Computer Support for Collaborative Learning (CSCL) is an international conference devoted to all issues related to computers and learning, including research, education, training, and technology.

Distributed Learning Workshop: http://www.dlworkshop.net

The Distributed Learning Workshop is a nonprofit group that creates high-quality Web-based instructional materials for college students.

Pew Internet & American Life Project: http://www.pewinternet.org

See description under NEWS MOSAICS (A2).

Resnick, M., A. Bruckman, and F. Martin. (1996) Pianos not stereos: Creating computational construction kits. Interactions, 3(6): 40–50. (http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/Papers/mres/pianos/pianos.html)

This article argues that computer systems need to be built for more than just ease of use, especially for educational purposes.

A9 STIMULATING ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

ACM SIGGRAPH: http://www.acm.org/siggraph

SIGGRAPH is the Special Interest Group on Graphics. In addition to publishing magazines and maintaining online art galleries, it holds an annual conference that features the latest in tools, research, and computer-based art.

Laurel, B. 1993. Computers as Theatre. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Although this book was first published before the Web took off, there is still a great deal of relevant material. Laurel’s main point is that designing pleasing user interfaces is similar to producing a play in theater, with multiple actors, a story, and a climax.

McCloud, S. (1993) Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press.

Although this book is a comic about comics, it is really about communicating through text and images in a static medium (just like the many Web pages). It is a fun read that takes a critical look at comics as a medium.

Shedroff, N. (2001) Experience Design. Indianapolis, IN: New Riders.

More of a thought provoker than a how-to guide, this book takes the reader through a diverse set of design ideas, focusing on feeling and emotion and on visual quality.

A10 WEB APPS THAT WORK

Drummond, M. 2001. The end of software as we know it. Fortune C/Net Tech Review. (http://fortune.cnet.com/fortune/0-5937473-7-7717969.html)

This article looks at how software may be delivered as a Web service in the future, looking at issues like standards, intellectual property, maintenance, pricing, and business models.

A11 ENABLING INTRANETS

CIO.com. (No date) Intranet/Extranet Research Center. (http://www.cio.com/research/intranet)

This Web site has a large collection of links, newsletters, interviews, white papers, and reports about building corporate intranets.

Fabris, P. (1999, April 1) You think tomaytoes I think tomahtoes. CIO Web Business Magazine. (http://www.cio.com/archive/webbusiness/040199_nort.html)

This article tells the story of the creation of a large intranet to support over 7,000 employees at Bay Networks. It describes some of the difficulties involved in understanding how information flowed through the company and the different ways in which people organized things.

Nielsen, J. (1999) Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. Indianapolis, IN: New Riders.

This book discusses a wide-ranging number of Web usability topics, such as page design, link names, link colors, writing for the Web, search, navigation, intranet design, accessibility, and internationalization. Many screen shots are included to illustrate concepts.

Pattern Group B: Creating a Navigation Framework

B1 MULTIPLE WAYS TO NAVIGATE

Brinck, T., D. Gergle, and S. Wood. (2002) Usability for the Web: Designing Web Sites That Work. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.

See description under Chapter 5—Processes for Developing Customer-Centered Sites.

Garrett, J. (No date) Information Architecture Resources. (http://www.jjg.net/ia)

This is a great resource for learning more about information architecture.

InformationDesign.org: http://www.informationdesign.org

This Web site is a hub for books, organizations, mailing lists, and other Web sites devoted to information design.

Lakoff, G. (1990) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

This book analyzes categories of language and thought from a cognitive science perspective. It also has one of the coolest titles of any book published in the twentieth century, which refers to how an Australian aboriginal language uses the same classifier to describe women, fire, and dangerous things.

Larson, K., and M. Czerwinski. (1998) Web page design: Implications of memory, structure and scent for information retrieval. CHI 1998, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI Letters, 1(1): 25–32.

This study examines the trade-off between breadth and depth for information architectures with respect to preference and performance. Breadth means that the architecture is designed so that many pieces of information are displayed per page (leading to a broad and shallow graph), and depth means that there are fewer pieces of information (leading to a narrow and deep graph). A total of 512 items from Microsoft Encarta were arranged into three Web sites differing in breadth and depth. The overall results were that increased depth led to longer browse times, while a balance between breadth and depth outperformed the broadest and shallowest structure. These findings lend more evidence to the theory that fewer clicks and fewer levels work better for organizing large amounts of information.

Rosenfeld, L., and P. Morville. (1998) Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. Cambridge: O’Reilly.

This book describes techniques for organizing, labeling, and indexing the information on a Web site for browsing and searching.

Selingo, J. (2000, August 3) A message to Web designers: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. New York Times E-Commerce Report. (http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/08/circuits/articles/03desi.html)

This article looks at the fact that many customers are resistant to change, wanting the power that familiarity and expertise affords. Web sites have had to make changes to accommodate this reality, including homepages that have both directories and search engines, homepages with many organized links instead of just a few, and a consistent structure behind the information.

Special Interest Group on Information Architecture: http://mail.asis.org/mailman/listinfo/sigia-l

This e-mail list is devoted to practitioner, researcher, and student issues in information architecture.

Tufte, E. (1984) The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

Tufte's book is a classic on presenting complex information graphically, stressing simplicity, elegance, and efficiency.

Tufte, E. (1997) Visual Explanations. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.

Another classic by Tufte, this book presents evidence relevant to cause and effect, for decision making and presentations.

Zaphiris, P., B. Shneiderman, and K. Norman. (1999, June) Expandable Indexes ersus Sequential Menus for Searching Hierarchies on the World Wide Web. (ftp://ftp.cs.umd.edu/pub/hcil/Reports-Abstracts-Bibliography/99-15html/99-15.html)

This study looks at the effectiveness of expanding menus for Web sites. Expanding menus show top-level hierarchies, revealing the next level of that hierarchy when the mouse is rolled over an item. The results indicate that reducing the depth of hierarchies improves browsing performance, lending more evidence to the theory that fewer clicks and fewer levels work better for organizing large amounts of information.

B2 BROWSABLE CONTENT