Web Application Design Patterns

Designing web applications is challenging. While their benefits motivate their creation, there are no well-established guidelines for design. This work documents design patterns for web applications by identifying design solutions for user interaction problems, and presenting how they should be applied. It enables you to design interfaces faster.

Autorentext
Pawan Vora is the founder and president of Alpha Cube, Inc., a user experience design consultancy focused on designing, reviewing, and evaluating user interfaces for software and web-based applications. He has been a user experience professional for more than 14 years and has designed user interfaces for a range of applications for business-to-consumer, business-to-business, consumer-to-consumer, and business-to-employee environments. He has published and conducted a number of tutorials and in-house training workshops on web site design, web application design, and design patterns in the United States and internationally. Pawan has a Ph.D. and M.S. in industrial engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo in addition to his bachelor's degrees in production engineering and mechanical engineering from Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute in Mumbai, India.

Klappentext
The current trend of using software as a service has led to an increase in the development and use of Web (or hosted) applications. Also, more recently, the opportunities of rich Internet applications (Web 2.0 and otherwise) offer up new design issues and solutions. But despite the pervasiveness of Web Applications, there are no standards for their design--unlike the standards offered by Windows or Macintosh platforms, for instance. So there are limited restrictions on how interaction is designed. This results in a wide variety of appearance and behavior of applications--even within the applications created by the same company, even those that have documentation standards and look-and-feel guidelines. We need only to look at ourselves to see some of these broad issues. The solution is design patterns for web applications, similar in concept to the design patterns now available for web site design and software engineering. That is the focus of this book.

Inhalt

Ch 1. Introduction: 1.1 WEB APPLICATIONS; 1.2 DESIGN PATTERNS; 1.3 ORGANIZATION OF PATTERNS; 1.4 USING PATTERNS IN THIS BOOK Ch 2. Forms: 2.1 CLEAR BENEFITS; 2.2 SHORT FORMS; 2.3 LOGICAL GROUPING; 2.4 LABEL POSITION; 2.5 REQUIRED FIELD INDICATORS; 2.6 SMART DEFAULTS; 2.7 FORGIVING FORMAT; 2.8 KEYBOARD NAVIGATION; 2.9 INPUT HINTS/PROMPTS; 2.10 ACTION BUTTONS; 2.11 INFORMATIVE ERROR MESSAGES Ch 3. Accessing and Exiting Web Applications: 3.1 REGISTER; 3.2 LOG IN; 3.3 LOG OUT; 3.4 AUTOMATIC TIMEOUT; 3.5 FORGOT LOGIN; 3.6 CAPTCHA Ch 4. Application Main page: 4.1 HOME; 4.2 PORTAL; 4.3 DASHBOARD; 4.4 CUSTOMIZATION; 4.5 PERSONALIZATION; 4.6 SKINS Ch 5. Navigating Applications: 5.1 GLOBAL NAVIGATION; 5.2 LOCAL NAVIGATION; 5.3 UTILITY NAVIGATION; 5.4 FACETED NAVIGATION 5.5 WIZARDS; 5.6 TAG CLOUDS; 5.7 BREADCRUMBS Ch 6. Search and Filtering: 6.1 SIMPLE SEARCH; 6.2 PARAMETRIC SEARCH; 6.3 SEARCH RESULTS; 6.4 ADVANCED SEARCH; 6.5 SEARCH TIPS; 6.6 SEARCH PAGINATION; 6.7 CONTINUOUS SCROLLING; 6.8 SAVED SEARCHES; 6.9 SORTING; 6.10 COLUMN FILTERING; 6.11 FILTERING Ch 7. Displaying and Manipulating Data: 7.1 GRIDS; 7.2 THREADED LISTS; 7.3 PAGINATION 7.4 CUSTOM VIEWS; 7.5 REPORTS; 7.6 PRINTER-FRIENDLY; 7.7 DETAILS; 7.8 EDITOR; 7.9 CONFIGURATOR; 7.10 COMPARISONS; 7.11 PROGRESSIVE DISCLOSURE; 7.12 UPLOAD/DOWNLOAD; 7.13 FEEDBACK/RATING; 7.14 CONTROL PANEL; 7.15 CHARTS; 7.16 ALBUM/GALLERY Ch 8. Rich Internet Applications: 8.1 RICH-TEXT EDITOR; 8.2 RICH FORM; 8.3 AUTO-SUGGEST/AUTO-COMPLETION; 8.4 EDIT-IN-PLACE; 8.5 OVERVIEW-PLUS-DETAIL; 8.6 DYNAMIC QUERYING; 8.7 LIVE PREVIEW; 8.8 DRAG-AND-DROP; 8.9 SLIDER; 8.10 ANIMATIONS/TRANSITIONS; 8.11 DELAY/PROGRESS INDICATORS; 8.12 SPOTLIGHT/YELLOW-FADE; 8.13 CAROUSEL Ch 9. Community and Collaboration: 9.1 USER PROFILE/AVATAR; 9.2 SPECIAL INTEREST COMMUNITY; 9.3 MY FRIENDS; 9.4 SHARED NETWORK 9.5 FEEDBACK/RATING; 9.6 RECOMMENDATION; 9.7 DISCOVER NETWORK MEMBERS; 9.8 SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY; 9.9 SHARING; 9.10 SYNCHRONOUS/ASYNCHRONOUS MESSAGING; 9.11 SHARED SCHEDULE/CALENDAR; 9.12 HISTORY; 9.13 FORUMS; 9.14 BLOGS Ch 10. Internationalization and Localization: 10.1 COUNTRY IDENTIFICATION; 10.2 FORMS; 10.3 LANGUAGE; 10.4 CURRENCY; 10.5 DATE Ch 11. Help: 11.1 INLINE HELP; 11.2 CONTEXTUAL HELP; 11.3 FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS; 11.4 APPLICATION HELP; 11.5 HOW TO GUIDES/GUIDED TOURS; 11.6 HELP WIZARDS; 11.7 COMMUNITY HELP Ch 12. Accessibility: 12.1 PROGRESSIVE ENHANCEMENT; 12.2 SEMANTIC STRUCTURE; 12.3 UNOBTRUSIVE STYLE SHEETS; 12.4 UNOBTRUSIVE JAVASCRIPT; 12.5 ACCESSIBLE FORMS; 12.6 ACCESSIBLE IMAGES; 12.7 ACCESSIBLE TABLES; 12.8 ACCESSIBLE NAVIGATION; 12.9 ACCESSIBLE ALTERNATIVE Ch 13. Visual Design: 13.1 LIQUID-WIDTH LAYOUT; 13.2 FIXED-WIDTH LAYOUT; 13.3 PROGRESSIVE LAYOUT; 13.4 GRID STRUCTURE; 13.5 VISUAL HIERARCHY; 13.6 HIGHLIGHT; 13.7 ICONS; 13.8 VISUAL EFFECTS Ch 14. Using Patterns and Pattern Libraries; 14.1 INTERACTION LEVEL AND PAGE LEVEL PATTERNS; 14.2 PATTERN LIBRARIES