Design Wise

Citation

Morris, A. (2000), "Design Wise", The Electronic Library, Vol. 18 No. 6, pp. 448-469. https://doi.org/10.1108/el.2000.18.6.448.5

Design Wise is a book aimed at readers who make decisions about which computer‐based information resources to use, to purchase or recommend to others. Its focus is not on factors like price, availability, or content but on interface design. The author says that the book is “written from the user’s perspective and evaluates how interface design affects daily interaction with resources”.

The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 introduces readers to interface design ideas and resource evaluation techniques. It contains three chapters. The first chapter discusses why and how interface design matters to computer users and largely draws on the field of human computer interaction (HCI). It concludes with an interview with Don Norman, a leading HCI researcher, who defines what an interface is and how users’ expectations of systems have increased. The second chapter presents a history of interface design approaches, concentrating on the waterfall method and user‐centred design. It attempts to give insight into how systems are designed and the trade‐offs that have to be made by designers in practice. Included in this chapter is an interview with Jakob Nielsen, a leading usability engineer, who discusses the purpose of usability testing, what is involved and its future. Chapter 3 expounds the theory that evaluation has become more complex with increasing information resources and an ever‐widening and diverse user base. It is argued that the usual criteria (price, content, availability) have become more obscured by a competitive, product‐happy market and that information resources should be evaluated from an interface design perspective. A design evaluation template is included which asks questions about task support, usability and aesthetics. The chapter is concluded with an interview with Reva Basch, an information industry expert, who talks about how the evaluation of resources is changing.

Part 2 contains four chapters. Chapters four to six discuss design issues relating to CD‐ROMs, Web sites and online commercial providers. Each chapter reviews the computer and library and information science literature and draws together the comments, findings, and design issues extrapolated from the sources. Also included are short and personalised field tests of a CD‐ROM product, a Web site and an online commercial provider, Dialog. The usual interviews of experts in the field conclude each chapter. The final chapter provides four predictions about the future of information resources and concludes that:

1. 1.

   (1) New players from the knowledge management initiative will shake up traditional information providers;

2. (2)

   Intelligent agents will fall short of the hype;

3. 3.

   (3) Search engines interfaces will become more intelligent;

4. 4.

   (4) Information professionals will become more involved in selecting online information resources and designing information resources as more end users undertake their own searching.

The book is easy to read, although somewhat repetitive in places. The author says that Chapters four to six introduce “unique design issues that are germane to the resources”. However, several of the design points made are repeated in different chapters. One of these is that the number of different colours displayed should not exceed four per screen. This recommendation stems from when computers were largely text screens and needs to be revisited in the light of modern computers with GUI interfaces. Graphics on a Web site or a CD‐ROM, for example, often have more than four colours, which do not detract the reader from reading the text on the screen. The numerous text boxes in the book, often spanning three pages, also have a tendency to repeat information in the main text; this makes reading the book rather disjointed. There are few typos but the screen shots on p. 55 are a repeat of those on p. 54; one can only guess what these should have been.

The book is a good starting‐point for readers wanting to find out more about interface design issues. However, I would have liked more on evaluation methods and I am not totally convinced that criteria such as content and price can be dismissed as easily as the author would like.