I just looked at the sample chapters for The Usability Kit, a comprehensive resource for web site designers that explains critical usability concepts and also provides actual templates for common interactions such as login pages, help and FAQ areas, My Account pages, etc.
I really like it. It’s a great idea, and it appears to be very well executed. I downloaded the sample from SitePoint, the kit distributor, and the sample chapters read great. Dan Szuc and Gerry Gaffney cover all the right topics. I’m really glad they covered the critical information architecture concepts of faceted classification, tagging, and folksonomies.
Let me do the full disclosure thing at this point: I’ve known Dan Szuc for a few years now, and consider him a friend. And I’ve recently met Gerry Gaffney. So I’m not an impartial observer. However, I consider myself a reasonably ethical person, so if I didn’t truly feel that this resource was worth your time, I would say so. (Or more likely, I just wouldn’t blog it.)
By far the best thing about The Usability Kit is the blueprints. In providing what amount to templates for common interactions, Gerry and Dan have gone where many others fear to tread. Let’s face it: there’s only so many *good* ways to design a login box or a “Subscribe To Our Newsletter” form. And if I’m reading SitePoint’s blurb page correctl, you actually get electronic copies of the blueprints, so you can build pages from the templates. (I could be wrong about this; and besides, who builds sites with static HTML anymore? That’s so 1998…)
Unfortunately, the SitePoint sample didn’t include the chapter about user research. I am very particular about how user research is done, because I’ve seen so many ill-conceived, inefficient and biased user research projects performed by well-meaning people. So I can’t speak to how well Gerry and Dan covered this topic.
Bottom line: would I buy yet another *book* about usability for US$197? Frak no. Would I buy this kit, with all its templates and other goodies? Frak yes.
So you decide. Am I logrolling (or shilling), or pointing y’all to a quality resource?
