Book Review: 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People

[Saint_Michael 3]

I will say this, I think the author, Ph.D Susan Weinschenk is going easy on us the readers and in short web designers/developers as well, but the question is how does this relate to the web design/develop world?

 

Well that is where it gets very interesting think of this book as 100 ways your life as a web designer/developer gets very difficult and requires a lot of planning and in a sense a descent size crew in developing websites and applications. That is of course if your starting from scratch in your designs and doesn't include anything already created to make life easier for you. Of course, it does help due to the fact that what has been designed already does cover a lot of what this books discusses, but like I said if your going to do something from scratch and your looking for a ultimate user experience for your websites or applications then this book is where you need to begin.

 

For an example, #11 talks about a interesting fact about people and that is this, "Nine percent of men and one-half percent of women are color-blind" and to make this stat more interesting I did some calculations. I will note that numbers are not accurate whatsoever but a close approximation based on those numbers. I will use the world population and then go further use the numbers based on the numbers of males and females.

 

An estimated 309,856,552 men are color-blind and and an estimated 16,932,549.3 women are colorblind and give it some sort of perspective, All of the US and and a small portion of Canada would be color blind. I would also like to point out there are billions of colors but if I remember my science correctly it deals with primary colors such as red, green, and blue.

 

So how does #11 apply to design and development? Easy, accessibility, when designing a website or developing an application it is a fair chance that some of your users will be color blind and so how do you deal with slight problem? For one think grey-scale when developing a website because that is what a person will see when they are color blind, nothing but shades of grey. So you have to figure out how to cater to this small group but still be able to add color to your website. Best way based on my experience is Dark on light or light on dark layouts, use icons to help get the message across or even better yet provide a color blind option for a user to switch to.

 

As you see just from reading that one "chapter" about know people I have become aware of what to think about when I am designing and this is especially important when UX comes into play. Just think 99 more things to think about when you read this book and yes it is something you need to think about because if you want to target a large audience this small group is part of it.