Fat Agnus

Over the years I have been involved in doing both backend and frontend development, but for some reason there seems to be a lack of understanding and maybe even respect for what Frontend Engineers do.

Maybe it is because that some people think that doing Html, Css, Javascript and so forth is easy, but in reality it can be really difficult, at least if you want to have it done right.

Browsers are the most hostile software development environment imaginable.
– Douglas Crockford

Douglas said this when he was talking about browsers on desktop computers, but he later on changed his mind when he saw how much worse it was on mobile.

There are so many things to keep track of when doing frontend development and you don’t have the same benefit as the Backend people do, like compiling your stuff, so you cant really trust what is going on.

In Nate Koechleys’s speech he sums up how many things that a frontend engineer needs to balance out.

A conservative number may be 672 different things we’re trying to balance as we built out these websites. – Nate Koechley

The number doesn’t include things like usability, performance and security.

In my mind, frontend engineers should get lots more credit for the work they do.

Watch Nate Koechley speak

For a couple of years I worked for a software company that sold e-commerce solutions, so many of the things that are presented in this book by Jakob Nielsen is something that I learned through that job. Despite many of the things that I learned, I discovered that there were new things to learn about creating e-commerce solutions. So if you have been designing solutions like this, then you probably are better of buying another book, because the price is a little bit too high and it wont outweigh the few new things you might learn.

Some of the areas covered in this book are:

• Selling strategies
• Category pages
• Product Pages
• Search
• Checkout / Registration
• International users

If you have read “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug and thought to yourself that the book needed to go into more details about different functionalities, then you will really like this book. Just like some of the other books by Jakob Nielsen (Designing Web Usability and Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed), you will see that he really digs into the websites that he analysis, therefore he can give you an good understanding of how users think and acts.

Jakob Nielsen gives a great example of this with a pie chart which shows that 27% have trouble finding the product(s) they want (which probably doesn`t surprise many), but 22% are unable or unwilling to complete and order when it comes to the Checkout/Registration process, which is the second largest issue.

Even though this book was published in 2001, many of the things he presents are still useable today, so if you are new to e-commerce then I would strongly recommend this book to you, if not, then you could probably find the missing parts online.

More about the book

How often have you found yourself in a situation where you have been troubled about the design of a function?

Personally, I would say, frequently. You can never be to sure if something will work and usability for me is one of the most important things.

As fare as I know, there aren`t very many software firms that test the usability of an application on a broad range of users, because it takes a lot of resources and most of them just want to get going – cause time is money. Therefore it is nice to draw on personal experiences, but also the experiences of others and there is written a few good books on the subject. The problem is, as I see it, that you seem to be missing something when you read the books, because they don`t dive into specific functionalities. It is nice to draw on what we call Web design patterns and Yahoo has a great collection of these.

Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

And if you are willing to spend some money, you could also buy one of the following rapports from Nielsen Norman Group

Usability publications by nngroup

Both the links contain great resources, but if you need a good book, then you should check out my Book review category.