Designing Web Interfaces

Book excerpt: Want to learn how to create great user experiences on today's Web? In this book, UI experts Bill Scott and Theresa Neil present more than 75 design patterns for building web interfaces that provide rich interaction. Distilled from the authors' years of experience at Sabre, Yahoo!, and Netflix, these best practices are grouped into six key principles to help you take advantage of the web technologies available today. With an entire section devoted to each design principle, Designing Web Interfaces helps you: Make It Direct-Edit content in context with design patterns for In Page Editing, Drag & Drop, and Direct Selection Keep It Lightweight-Reduce the effort required to interact with a site by using In Context Tools to leave a "light footprint" Stay on the Page-Keep visitors on a page with overlays, inlays, dynamic content, and in-page flow patterns Provide an Invitation-Help visitors discover site features with invitations that cue them to the next level of interaction Use Transitions-Learn when, why, and how to use animations, cinematic effects, and other transitions React Immediately-Provide a rich experience by using lively responses such as Live Search, Live Suggest, Live Previews, and more Designing Web Interfaces illustrates many patterns with examples from working websites. If you need to build or renovate a website to be truly interactive, this book gives you the principles for success.