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User-Centered Website Development: A Human-Computer Interaction Approach Daniel D. McCracken and Rosalee J. Wolfe. 2004. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc. [ISBN: 0-13-041101-2. 305 pages, including index. $60.00 USD (softcover).]
Dan McCracken and Rosalee Wolfe, both computer science professors, have written a textbook that would also work well as an introductory book for practitioners. You do not need any computer science background to read User-centered Website development. It is clearly written, directed at the reader, with no academic jargon. Each chapter has many visual examples.
As the title suggests, McCracken and Wolfe combine two important topics in this book: an introduction to the concepts and practice of human-computer interaction (HCI) and details of many aspects of user-centered Web site design.
The first eight chapters are meant to build a solid foundation in HCI. These chapters cover an introduction to HCI, human perception, user and task analysis, content organization, visual organization, navigation, prototyping, and evaluation. The final six chapters are on more specific topics: color, typography, multimedia, accessibility, globalization, and privacy/trust. An appendix introduces XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets.
Each of the first eight chapters provides a good introduction to its topic. In each case, other books exist that provide more in-depth treatment, but clearly, the authors had to trade off what they could say on each topic with their desire to cover many topics.
In the first chapter, McCracken and Wolfe take a broad view of HCI, naming 12 disciplines that contribute to our understanding of human-computer interaction. Their list (p. 6) includes technical writing.
Following the overview and introduction to human perception, McCracken and Wolfe go through techniques of an...