philcrissman.com

O’Reilly Network’s Safari service has just undergone a redesign.

This is not a drum I’ve beaten in awhile, but I’m firmly in the design matters camp. Design can mean a lot more than whether the product is “pretty” or not (for “product”, insert website, magazine, gadget, etc) — it can make the difference as to whether it is usable, functional, and intuitive, or not. It can mean the difference between a product that makes you go WOW! and one that makes you shrug your shoulders and move on.

It’s partly a science (or an art, if you prefer), but I think a great deal of it is also personal preference. I was pretty interested in Ma.gnolia when it was introduced, partly because of some effective marketing buzz, and partly because the site looked great (thanks to Zeldman and Co., I think). However, after using it for awhile, I eventually just stopped visiting. Is ma.gnolia “prettier” than de.licio.us? I’m sure it is. But I still wound up preferring de.licio.us… I’ve yet to put my finger on exactly why this is.

Maybe I’m not going to be able to express the why to that question — I have a feeling that, if I could, I could probably make a living as a highly paid consultant instead of a tech support professional blogging in obscurity… ;-)

Back to Safari: I like the redesign. I think it’s excellent, and not only that, I think it was needed. Their user interface has not changed too much, which is fine because it was quite good to begin with; in their case, much of the change is indeed aesthetic. Other changes are more subtle; it now seems to “remember” the last book I was reading, and takes me straight there. Transitions “feel” smoother, though I have no way to benchmark that.

My one gripe about the design is an ajax-ish feature which is not new to this design, but which remains… on each book’s “main page” you will see a brief summary. Under the summary is a button labelled “Expand”, which, if clicked, will smoothly slide down to reveal the rest of the truncated summary. Nice… but in almost every case, there is only an extra line or two of the summary revealed by this exercise. In many cases, the summary is so short that you can read the whole thing without clicking the “Expand” button (which is there anyways, ready to expand some helpful whitespace). It seems like a wasted feature — just an excuse to use some fancy Javascript where no such feature is really needed.

All in all, that’s a small gripe. If you are a voracious consumer of tech books, but don’t want to buy every single book that you just might need to refer to for a month or two (and may only need a few chapters from), I still recommend the Safari service. And kudos, once again, on the smart-looking redesign.