End of finan­cial year around here means lots of boxes arriv­ing from Ama­zon, spend­ing up on those juicy tax-deductible books.

One of my pur­chases was 37 Sig­nals’ Defen­sive Design for the web. Thumb­ing through a copy at a col­leagues’ office impressed me enough to order my own copy.

It’s a thin book… it was read from cover to cover in a day and a half or so of com­mutes. But it’s really inter­est­ing because it’s chock full of things that every­one already knows, or at least would if they stopped and thought about it. What should hap­pen if a search query returns no results? No brainer — inform the user and sug­gest some alter­na­tives. What about if a required form field isn’t filled out? Inform the user in an obvi­ous place they’ll able to see, of course. So how come there’s so many sites out there that don’t do these obvi­ous things?

Defen­sive Design may not have the answer why, but it does have sec­tions on all the com­mon points of fail­ure in a web appli­ca­tion, and what you should and shouldn’t do for the best pos­si­ble user expe­ri­ence. I par­tic­u­larly liked the real world exam­ples of good and bad cases, mostly on really well-known sites — it’s good to know even the big boys get it wrong some­times! It’s a great book to hit your­self over the head with, and has a handy check­list at the end you can use to check your own sites. While it seems to focus a lot on ecom­merce sites, the prin­ci­ples apply to pretty much any site.

If this were a review (is it?) I would rate this book about 9 out of 10.