I just finished reading robert hoekman, jr.’s book, ‘Designing The Obvious – A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design.’

While browsing the local bookstore I spotted a book which looked like one of those O’Reilly pocket references titled “Designing The Obvious.” I flipped through the contents and saw reference to quite a few noteworthy newer web applications and decided to fork over the $35 for the book. [Good decision]

I finished the book in about 3 days, and the book is an excellent read. Through helpful suggestions, Hoekman offers no nonsense approaches to web design for successful user friendly applications. One thing I found very interesting is all of the references to Japanese manufacturing assembly line techniques. If you’ve read “The Toyota Way” then you’ll know many of the terms Hoekman applies to web applications. Using Kaizen, poke-yoke, 5S… to focus your development for ease of use applications.

After reading this book it made me want to jump in to action redesigning some of our web applications, or at least make small improvements to their interfaces. If you develop any front end portions of web based applications, you should seriously get this book. I’d let you borrow my copy, but it’s already out on loan to alvin.