Albert N. Badre: Recently Published

Addison-Wesley

ISBN:
0-201-72993-8

Publisher:
Addison Wesley Professional

Copyright:
2002

Format:
Paper; 304 pp

Published:
01/23/2002

Shaping Web Usability: Interaction Design in Context
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.