Designing the Obvious Book Review

A common sense approach to web application design

‘Designing the obvious’ explains why and how to design web-based applications that are so easy to use that people attribute their ability to use them effectively to pure common sense.

‘Designing the obvious’ advises you to only build what is necessary in your web applications, and when building applications to put those ‘nice to have’ features in a folder and store them for later on, as you want to make your applications easy to use.

‘Designing the obvious’ also advises that designing simple applications will turn beginners into intermediate users very fast. It also tells you to prevent errors whenever possible and handle the errors that you cannot prevent gracefully with meaningful messages.

Also the book tells you to not listen to users demands but actually stick to the vision you started out with and the core application that you want to create. More features in an application just create more frustration and more for your users to learn. You really need to keep things simple.

‘Designing the obvious’ is a well laid out book with some nice examples of website applications that perform a simple task very well. A number of design teams of the applications mentioned in the book have been interviewed and asked how they came up with their designs.

The book also covers how to design screens and forms as well as how to design with uniformity in mind across your applications.

‘Designing the obvious’ will get you thinking about your web applications and will hopefully make you think before you code and allow you to produce easy to use web sites.