How can you bring your ideas to life in the face of such complexity? Orchestrating Experiences is a practical guide for designers and everyone struggling to create products and services in complex environments.

    Games User Research is collectively the way we optimise the quality of the user experience (UX) in games, working with all aspects of a game from the mechanics and interface, visuals and art, interaction and progression, making sureevery element works in concert and supports the game UX.This means that Games User Research is essential and integral to the production of games and to shape the experience of players. Today, Games User Research stands as the primary pathway to understanding players and how to design, build, and launch games that provide the right game UX.Until now, the knowledge in Games User Research and Game UX has been fragmented and there were no comprehensive, authoritative resources available. This book bridges the current gap of knowledge in Games User Research, building the go-to resource for everyone working with players and games or otherinteractive entertainment products. It is accessible to those new to Games User Research, while being deeply comprehensive and insightful for even hardened veterans of the game industry. In this book, dozens of veterans share their wisdom and best practices on how to plan user research, obtain theactionable insights from users, conduct user-centred testing, which methods to use when, how platforms influence user research practices, and much, much more.

    The aim is to find more accessible and robust solutions for the patterns we author, plug in, and use every day.Each chapter tackles a single component, addressing how different and vulnerable people might read and interact with it, and how they can be better accommodated. The in-depth explorations are meticulously illustrated and code examples culminate as working demos.Inclusive design is not about wrong and right, but bad to better. You'll learn plenty of tips from Inclusive Components, but you'll also adopt the mindset to go on and make even better components.

    But smartphones don’t know if we’re having a bad day, and cars couldn’t care less about compassion. Technology is developing more IQ, but it still lacks EQ. In this book, Pamela Pavliscak—design researcher and advisor to Fortune 500 companies—explores new research about emotion, new technology that engages emotion, and new emotional design practices. Drawing on her own research and the latest thinking in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics, Pamela shows you how design can help promote emotional well-being. You’ll learn: How design has transformed emotion and how tech is transforming it again New principles for merging emotional intelligence and design thinking How to use a relationship model for framing product interactions and personality Methods for blending well-being interventions with design patterns How emotional resonance can guide designers toward ethical futures Implications of emotionally intelligent technology as it scales from micro- to mega-emotional spheres

    Responsive Issues Community Group (RICG) chair Mat Marquis helps us make smart decisions about images and shows us the swiftest way to improve a website’s performance: from understanding compression methods used by common image formats, to responsive image markup patterns and their usage, to handling content delivery for the best user experience. Get up to speed—and speed up your site.