WEB application design handbook

Critical Acclaim For WEB APPLICATION DESIGN HANDBOOK Best Practices for Web-Based Software “Susan and Victor have written the ‘Junior Woodchucks Guidebook’ of Web applications: Everything you need to know is in there, including tons of best-practice examples, insights from years of experience, and assorted fascinating arcana If you’re writing a Web application, you’d be foolish not to have a copy.” STEVE KRUG Author of Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability “Web sites are so nineties The cutting edge of Web-design has moved to Web applications If you are, like many Web designers, struggling to create dynamic, highly-functional Web-based applications, you need this book It describes how Web applications differ from Web sites, and provides excellent guidance for common Web-application design problems, such as navigation, data input, search, reports, forms, and interactive graphic output.” JEFF JOHNSON Principal Usability Consultant, UI Wizards, Inc., and author of Web Bloopers and GUI Bloopers “User interface designers have been debating among themselves for years about how to design effective Web applications There were no comprehensive references that covered the myriad topics that emerged in these debates until Fowler and Stanwick took on the challenge and wrote Web Application Design Handbook, the first comprehensive guide to building Web applications This book tackles design problems faced by every Web development team with uncommon wisdom, clear prose, and detailed examples Key topics include: modifying the browser interface to meet application security and efficiency requirements, searching, sorting, filtering, building efficient and usable data input mechanisms, generating reports, preventing errors, and using creative visualization techniques to optimize the display of large sets of data Endorsements Continued This thorough work should be a primary reference for everyone designing Web applications.” CHAUNCEY E WILSON Principal HCI Architect, WilDesign Consulting “Every so often you run into a book and say to yourself: ‘It’s so obvious that this book should be read by every developer, so why wasn’t it written years ago?’ This is one of those books.” SCOTT AMBLER Author of The Object Primer: Agile Model Driven Development with UML WEB APPLICATION DESIGN HANDBOOK Best Practices for Web-Based Software The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies Series Editors: Stuart Card, PARC; Jonathan Grudin, Microsoft; Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group Web Application Design Handbook: Best Practices for Web-Based Software Susan Fowler and Victor Stanwick Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction Mary Beth Rosson and John M Carroll The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone’s Impact on Society Rich Ling Your Wish is My Command: Programming by Example Edited by Henry Lieberman Information Visualization: Perception for Design, 2nd Edition Colin Ware GUI Bloopers: Don’ts and Dos for Software Developers and Web Designers Jeff Johnson Interaction Design for Complex Problem Solving: Developing Useful and Usable Software Barbara Mirel The Craft of Information Visualization: Readings and Reflections Written and edited by Ben Bederson and Ben Shneiderman HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks: Towards a Multidisciplinary Science Edited by John M Carroll Web Bloopers: 60 Common Web Design Mistakes, and How to Avoid Them Jeff Johnson Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research Mike Kuniavsky Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces Carolyn Snyder Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do B J Fogg Coordinating User Interfaces for Consistency Edited by Jakob Nielsen Usability for the Web: Designing Web Sites that Work Tom Brinck, Darren Gergle, and Scott D.Wood Information Visualization: Perception for Design Colin Ware Robots for Kids: Exploring New Technologies for Learning Edited by Allison Druin and James Hendleer 2003) Date, Time, Address, and Number Standards and Internationalization Bainbridge, Alex July 2002 “Hotel date entry, design and usability.” Travel UCD http://www travelucd.com/research/date_entry_hotel_july2002.php (accessed 30 October 2003) Caldwell, Lori 3rd Quarter 2000 “User preferences for date controls.” Usable Bits http://hid.fidelity.com/q32000/date_controls.htm (accessed 28 October 2003) Eastlake, D., T Goldstein “ECML v1.1: Field specifications for e-commerce.” The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3106.txt (accessed 23 October 2003) ISO November 25, 2002 “ISO 4217:2001, Codes for the representation of currencies and funds.” ISO Currency Codes http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/popstds/currencycodes.html (accessed 30 October 2003) OASIS “XML standards for ‘global’ customer information management.” http://www oasis-open.org/committees/ciq/ciq.shtml (accessed 30 October 2003) Sato, Takayuki K (ed.) “Data book of cultural convention in Asian countries.” Center of the International Cooperation for Computerization (CICC) http://www.cicc.or.jp/english/ hyoujyunka/databook/contents.htm (accessed 30 October 30, 2003) Universal Postal Union “Postal addressing systems in member countries.” http://www.upu.int/ post_code/en/addressing_formats_guide.shtml (accessed 30 October 2003) Xencraft 2003 “Currency internationalization (i18n), multiple currencies and foreign exchange (FX).” http://www.xencraft.com/resources/multi-currency.html (accessed 30 October, 2003) Dropdown Type-Ahead Kruse, Matt Undated AutoComplete http://www.mattkruse.com/javascript/autocomplete/ (accessed 29 October 2003) Zakas, Nicholas C “Make life easy with autocomplete textboxes.” Sitepoint http://www.sitepoint com/article/1220 (accessed 23 October 2003) Flash for Input Forms Klee, Matthew Undated “Flash + information visualization = great user experiences.” http://world.std.com/~uieweb/Articles/info_visualization.htm (accessed 21 January 2003) Nielsen, Jakob November 25, 2002 “Flash and web-based applications.” Alertbox http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20021125.htm (accessed 30 October 2003) Nielsen, Jakob Undated “Usability review of the Pet Market demo: Good high-level ideas, some bad details.” http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/blueprint/articles/nielsen.html (accessed 23 July 2002) 621 622 Resources Perfetti, Christine August 20, 2002 “Flash strikes back: Creating powerful web applications.” http://world.std.com/~uieweb/Articles/flash_strikes_back.htm (accessed 21 January 2003) Perfetti, Christine December 11, 2002 “iHotelier: Demonstrating the potential of Flash for web app design.” http://world.std.com/~uieweb/Articles/potential_of_flash.htm (accessed 21 January 2003) Pressman, Eric Undated.“The usability testing process for Pet Market.” http://www.macromedia.com/ devnet/mx/blueprint/articles/usabilitybp.html (accessed 23 July 2002) Schroeder, Will, Christine Perfetti, Jared M Spool 2002 “Enhancing user interaction in Pet Market.” User Interface Engineering http://www.uie.com/whitepaper.htm (accessed 23 October 2003) Input Form Design Jarrett, Caroline 2000 “Designing usable forms: The three-layer model of the form.” Forms That Work http://www.formsthatwork.com/ftp/DesigningUsableForms.pdf (accessed August 2003) Miller, Sarah, Caroline Jarrett 2001 “Should I use a dropdown? Four steps for choosing form elements on the Web.” Forms That Work http://www.formsthatwork.com/ftp/dropdown.pdf (accessed August 2003) Syndication and Cross-Site Interactions Kindlund, Erika September/October 1997 “Navigating the applet–browser divide.” IEEE Software 16(5): 22–25 Also available at http://www.computer.org/software/so1997/pdf/s5022.pdf (accessed November 2003) OASIS September 26, 2003 “RDF Rich Site Summary (RSS).” Cover Pages http://xml.coverpages org/rss.html (accessed November 2003) Shubin, Hal November 1997.“Navigation in web applications.” Interactions 4(6):13–17 Also available at http://www.user.com/webapps/webapps.htm (accessed November 2003) Data Retrieval Articles and Web Sites Chen, Hsin-Liang, Edie M Rasmussen Fall 1999 “Intellectual access to images.” Library Trends 49:2, 291–302 Cockburn, Andy, Bruce McKenzie April 20–25, 2002 “Evaluating the effectiveness of spatial memory in 2D and 3D physical and virtual environments,” CHI 2002 4(1):203–210 Danzico, Elizabeth November 16, 2001 “Search interface standards.” http://bobulate.com/popups/ search_p1.html (accessed 10 September 2003) FacetMap, faceted (filtered) classification system: http://www.facetmap.com/index.jsp Hastings, Samantha K Fall 1999 “Evaluation of image retrieval systems: Role of user feedback.” Library Trends 49:2, 438–452 Mescellany, Peter September 23, 2001 “Innovation in classification.” http://www.peterme.com/ archives/00000063.html (accessed 10 September 2003) Morris, Joan, Pattie Maes June 3–June 7, 2000 “Sardine: An agent-facilitated airline ticket bidding system.” http://web.media.mit.edu/~joanie/sardine/AGENTS2000-DEMO-Sardine.pdf Software Data Output Demos, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 2000), Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain (accessed 20 June 2002) Quesenbery, Whitney 2001 “Search interfaces for information portals.” http://www.cognetics com/papers/whitney/search-ui.pdf (accessed 10 September 2003) Rappoport, Avi January 3, 2003 “Search tools for web sites and intranets.” http://www searchtools.com/ (accessed February 2004) Ruthven, I., M Lalmas, C J van Rijsbergen 1999 “Retrieval through explanation: An abductive inference approach to relevance feedback.” http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~igr/Papers/aics.pdf (accessed July 2002) Sarwar, Badrul, George Karypis, Joseph Konstan, John Reidl April 2001 “Item-based collaborative filtering recommendation algorithms.” Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on World Wide Web, pp 285–295 Scott, Stacey D., Neal Lesh, Gunnar W Klau April 20–25, 2002 “Investigating human–computer optimization” CHI 2002, pp 155–162 Shearin, Sybil, Henry Lieberman January 14–17, 2001 “Intelligent profiling by example.” http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/Lieberary/Apt-Decision/Apt-Decision.html Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2001), Santa Fe, NM, pp 145–152 (accessed 20 June 2002) Westera, Gillian September 9, 2003 “Comparison of search engine user interface capabilities.” http://lisweb.curtin.edu.au/about/gwpersonal/compare.html (accessed 10 September 2003) Youll, Jim, Joan Morris, Raffi Krikorian, Pattie Maes 2001 “Impulse: Location-based agent assistance.” http://web.media.mit.edu/~jim/projects/impulse/impulse_WMRC_Briefing00.pdf Web Intelligence 2001 (accessed July 2002) Data Output Formatting For more on “green bars” for reports, see Tom Tullis’s article “Usable Bits: Designing Data Tables for the Web,” Second Quarter, 2001: http://hid fidelity.com/q22001/tables.htm Paper Sizes EDS, Inc 2004 “Guide to international paper sizes, concise tables of measurements.” http://home.inter.net/eds/paper/papersize.html (accessed February 2004) Kuhn, Markus December 23, 2003 “International standard paper size.” shttp://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ ~mgk25/iso-paper.html (accessed February 2004) Printing For printing in Java, see Printing Help for Java™ Developers at http://java.sun.com/printing/whitepaper.html (accessed 04 October 2002) 623 624 Resources Software Reporting & Document Management Packages Actuate Corporation, http://actuate.com/ Crystal Decisions, http://www.crystaldecisions.com/ Jinfonet Software, http://www.jinfonet.com/ SwiftView, Inc., http://www.swiftview.com Output Forms, XML, and Business An umbrella organization, ebXML, is developing standards for messaging, collaborative work, business processes, and core components as well See “ebXML: Enabling a Global Electronic Market,” http://www.ebxml.org/ (accessed 11 October 2002) The OASIS Universal Business Language Technical Committee is developing a standard library of XML business documents (purchase orders, invoices, and so on) See “OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) TC,” http://www oasis-open.org/committees/ubl/ (accessed 11 October 2002) RosettaNet offers messaging standards for the information technology (IT), electronic components (EC) and semiconductor manufacturing (SM) supply chain, including manufacturers, distributors, resellers, shippers and end users See “Standards,” http://www.rosettanet.org/standards (accessed 10 October 2002) The Uniform Code Council addresses XML standards in food and beverage, government, general merchandise, health care, and industrial and commercial areas See “Uniform Code Council, Inc.: The Global Language of Business,” http://www.uc-council.org/ (accessed 10 October 2002) The XML Common Business Library organization is creating e-commerce standards for global integration for business services See “XCBL.org: XML Common Business Library,” http://www.xcbl.org/index.html (accessed 11 October 2002) Typefaces Accessible Typefaces Bitstream, Tiresias fonts—typefaces for the visually impaired in Windows and Macintosh TrueType format: http://www.bitstream.com/categories/products/fonts/tiresias/ index.html Articles Haley, Allan Undated “Typefaces for the web.” Fontent http://www.fonts.com/fontent/ fontent_home.asp?nCo=AFMT&con=web (accessed 15 August 2002) Kahn, Paul, Krzysztof Lenk November/December 1998 “Design: principles of typography for user interface design,” Interactions 5(6): 15–29 Graphs And Charts Online Typography Information Apple Computer: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Typography-date.html Microsoft Typography: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/default.mspx Type Foundries Note: These larger and well-known U.S foundries sell international typefaces, but if you are using a non-Latin typeface, you may want to look locally as well Locally produced typefaces may be more attuned to the local esthetic Adobe Type Library: http://www.adobe.com/type/main.jhtml Agfa|Monotype: http://fonts.com/ Bitstream, Inc.: http://www.bitstream.com/ International Typeface Corporation: http://www.itcfonts.com/ P22 Online: http://www.p22.com/ Graphs and Charts Data Scraping 123 ASPX Directory of ASP.NET Resources, multiple articles and tutorials: http://www 123aspx.com/directory.asp Advanced Information Extractor, web scraping software: http://poorva.com/aie/ ASP Alliance, various articles: http://authors.aspalliance.com/ Connotate Technologies, automated data extraction, web scraping, and web mining software: http://www.connotate.com/ Electric Sheep Web, Cool ColdFusion Resources, “The secret art of data scraping”: http://www.electricsheep.co.nz/toolbox/scrape.cfm Rick Leinecker’s e-book, Data scraping information from the web with ASP.NET, available from Amazon.com Software Packages CORDA Technologies, Inc., http://www.corda.com/ Critical Tools, http://www.criticaltools.com/ Crystal Decisions, http://www.crystaldecisions.com/ ILOG, Inc., http://www.ilog.com/ Intellisys Inc., http://www.webintellisys.com/ Inxight Software, Inc., http://www.inxight.com/ netViz Corporation, http://www.netviz.com/ Rational Rose, http://www.rational.com/ RFF Electronics, http://www.rff.com/ SmartDraw.com, http://www.smartdraw.com/ SPSS, Inc., http://www.spss.com/ Tensegrity Software, http://www.tensegrity-software.com/ Tom Sawyer Software, http://www.tomsawyer.com/ University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab, http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/ Visual Mining, Inc., http://visualmining.com/ 625 626 Resources Statistical Analysis Box, George E P., et al 1978 Statistics for experimenters: An introduction to design, data analysis, and model building New York: Wiley Interscience Campbell, Donald T., Julian C Stanley 1966 Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for research Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Cleveland, William S Bell Laboratories: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/departments/sia/wsc/ (accessed October 2003) Hawkes Learning Systems CD-ROM tutorials for statistics and business statistics: http://www quantsystems.com/sta.htm (accessed October 2003) Huff, Darrell 1982 How to Lie with Statistics New York: W.W Norton & Co MiC Online Courses, “Primer in Statistics—Part I,” /http://www.margaret.net/statistics/ Montgomery, Douglas 2000 Design and analysis of experiments 5th ed New York: John Wiley & Sons Moore, David S 2000 Statistics concepts and controversies, 5th ed New York: W H Freeman & Co Niles, Robert “Robert Niles’s Journalism Help: Statistics Every Writer Should Know,” http://www.robertniles.com/stats/ (accessed October 2003) Rosenthal, Robert, Ralph L Rosnow 1991 Essentials of behavioral research: Methods and data analysis, 2nd ed New York: McGraw-Hill Rumsey, Deborah 2003 Statistics for dummies Columbus, OH: For Dummies Wilkinson, Leland, SPSS, Inc., Java graphing applets: http://www.spss.com/research/wilkinson/ (accessed October 2003) Diagrams Software and APIs ILOG, Inc., http://www.ilog.com/ Inxight Software, Inc., http://www.inxight.com/ SmartDraw.com, http://www.smartdraw.com/ Tom Sawyer Software, http://www.tomsawyer.com/ University of Maryland’s Human–Computer Interaction Lab, treemaps, http://www.cs.umd.edu/ hcil/treemap-history/index.shtml Cause-and-Effect Diagrams Xu, Yan 2001 “Cause-classified control chart and its application.” Management Auditing Journal 16(4):227–233 Also available at http://repository.ust.hk/retrieve/124/audit3cchart.pdf (accessed October 2003) Software Design Diagrams Software Packages ERwin Data Modeler from Computer Associates “AllFusion ERwin Data Modeler is a powerful database development tool, automatically generating tables and thousands of lines of stored procedure and trigger code for leading databases.” See http://www3.ca.com/ (accessed May 2003) for more information ... has moved to Web applications If you are, like many Web designers, struggling to create dynamic, highly-functional Web- based applications, you need this book It describes how Web applications... on the challenge and wrote Web Application Design Handbook, the first comprehensive guide to building Web applications This book tackles design problems faced by every Web development team with...Critical Acclaim For WEB APPLICATION DESIGN HANDBOOK Best Practices for Web- Based Software “Susan and Victor have written the ‘Junior Woodchucks Guidebook’ of Web applications: Everything