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Book Review: Information Design Workbook

August 15, 2013 By Scott

Worth Reading?

No.

Why?

For the under $15 price on Amazon, this book is likely worthwhile for those brand new to the field of online interaction design. For any with even a little bit of experience, however, it’s not very deep. Moreover, for all readers, there’s some odd problems with the book itself given its topic.

* Lot’s of Product and Project Management Fluff: This seems true of a lot of similar books. The author spends a fair amount of time discussing stakeholder product management. While this is critical info for any profession, there’s other readings for this sort of thing. But if you are going to include it as just a side topic, make your points and be done. Don’t waste a lot of space.

* Lots of tiny type: Many of the callouts are in unnecessarily small type. (Such as 6pts!) This isn’t something you’d do on the web, and it’s certainly not something you do in print in a book for Information Design. Even for a younger readership with sharp eyesight, this was a bad choice.

* Included Imagery is too small: Where example graphics are included, they’re often too small. Specifically, where graphics are included and those graphics include textual labels, the labels are tiny and effectively unreadable in many cases.

* List of Bullet Points / Checklists: There aren’t too many. This is really a How To book in a lot of ways. There’s many places where prose could and should have been replaced by simple checklists.

* Templates: I’d have expected some more templates. For example, there’s reviews of some basic site map styles and wire frames, but how about putting some stakes in the ground and suggest some best practices beyond describing a numbering system. How about some other examples of how wire frames are done?

The bottom line? I wouldn’t personally recommend this book. There’s too many other great resources online to get much greater depth than available here. In today’s world, the primary values of actually printing books might include the ability to include sharp and large graphic examples, or perhaps render the flow of a subject in a medium where flipping around a physical book has some value. I just didn’t see much value in the work; either the content itself or how it was presented.

Filed Under: Book Review

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