Addison-Wesley
ISBN:
0-201-72993-8
Publisher:
Addison Wesley Professional
Copyright:
2002
Format:
Paper; 304 pp
Published:
01/23/2002
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A Short Description
Designing usable web sites, ones that are easy to use and provide
a pleasant, enjoyable user experience requires employing the web-specialized
methodology of "designing for context". Defining the context
of web interaction along with an early focus on the user produces
user-centered web design. Using a contextual strategy to design
web sites requires us to consider five levels of design context
including the environment, the user, the genre, the site, and the
page contexts.
The
central theme of the book is the focus on "web context".
I provide arguments for a contextual approach to web design that
include treatments of the web environment, the user, the web genre,
the web site, and the web page. I devote a separate chapter to each
of these "web contexts". In other chapters, I delineate
a user-centered approach to web design and tackle the usability
issues of retrofitting web pages for small-screen real estate. I
also take up the challenge of the encounter between web art and
web usability, talk about how to evaluate the usability of web sites,
and discuss the cultural context of web design.
Throughout
the book, I present web examples to illustrate concepts, techniques,
and guidelines. This provides for a close relationship between theory
and practice, and thus narrows the potential gap between the researcher's
interests and the practitioner's needs.
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