Useful Zombies

You can't put the kibosh on zombies as a web developer without knowing some code, but you also have to understand how a user will approach your website. We’re so used to looking at websites that we often take for granted the little things that make them easy to navigate and smack zombies around with. And, just like your mom, you have a blind spot for your work. You know what you intended, and so you know whether a link or menu or piece of content is significant or ignorable. You know how to get from page A of the website to page B to page Q without even thinking about it. Unfortunately for us (and fortunately for you), no one shares your brain. No one thinks exactly the same way as you do—unless you're part of a zombie horde.

To make your site intuitive and easy for a user to navigate, there's a concept called “usability.” There's no exact scoring system for how usable or unusable a site is, but there is a continuum, with usable-ness and happy content users at one end, and unusable-ness and apocalypticly depressed users at the other.

Because of that blind spot, even when you aim for a usable website, you can't always be sure you have one, until you test it with other users. Usability testing is, itself, a vast and deep subject. This book covers the basics, the things that live in the gap between code and design—the things zombies hope you won’t learn. It’s about how a website works and whether a user understands how to navigate the site you’ve built. But there’s also an amount of usability that should happen on the back end, where you are building a site and maintaining it. Better maintenance and better usability both lead to less crying and fewer zombies, so it’s a win for everyone. Plus you’ll have a site that more people than just your mom will love.