Instead of forcing users to conform to a product design or experience, designers need to learn how users behave and interact with various digital interfaces.This guide provides some key principles from psychology to help you design more intuitive, human-centered products and experiences. Humans have an underlying blueprint for how we perceive and process the world around us, and through simple lessons in psychology, this guide will help you define this blueprint.

    Even though the specification is still in development, many modern browsers and mobile devices already support HTML5 and CSS3. This book gets you up to speed on the new HTML5 elements and CSS3 features you can use right now, and backwards compatible solutions ensure that you don't leave users of older browsers behind. This book gets you started working with many useful new features of HTML5 and CSS3 right away. Gone are the days of adding additional markup just to style a button differently or stripe tables. You'll learn to use HTML5's new markup to create better structure for your content and better interfaces for your forms, resulting in cleaner, easier-to-read code that can be understood by both humans and programs. You'll find out how to embed audio, video, and vector graphics into your pages without using Flash. You'll see how web sockets, client-side storage, offline caching, and cross-document messaging can ease the pain of modern web development. And you'll discover how simple CSS3 makes it to style sections of your page. Throughout the book, you'll learn how to compensate for situations where your users can't take advantage of HTML5 and CSS3 yet, developing solutions that are backwards compatible and accessible. You'll find what you need quickly with this book's modular structure, and get hands-on with a tutorial project for each new HTML5 and CSS3 feature covered. "Falling Back" sections show you how to create solutions for older browsers, and "The Future" sections at the end of each chapter get you excited about the possibilities when HTML5 and CSS3 reach widespread adoption. Get ready for the future---in fact, it's here already.

    Combining practical, theoretical, and historical, this book is a must for graphic artists, editors, or anyone working with the printed page using digital or traditional methods.Having established itself as a standard in its field The Elements of Typographic Style is house manual at most American university presses, a standard university text, and a reference work in studios of designers around the world. It has been translated into italian and greek, and dutch.

    With this practical book, you'll explore the often-misunderstood practice of user story mapping, and learn how it can help keep your team stay focused on users and their experience throughout the development process.You and your team will learn that user stories aren't a way to write better specifications, but a way to organize and have better conversations. This book will help you understand what kinds of conversations you should be having, when to have them, and what to keep track of when you do. Learn the key concepts used to create a great story map. Understand how user stories really work, and how to make good use of them in agile and lean projects. Examine the nuts and bolts of managing stories through the development cycle. Use strategies that help you continue to learn before and after the product's release to customers and usersUser Story Mapping is ideal for agile and lean software development team members, product managers and UX practitioners in commercial product companies, and business analysts and project managers in IT organizations—whether you're new to this approach or want to understand more about it.

    The term 'hacker' has been redefined to consist of anyone who has an insatiable curiosity as to how things work--and how they can try to make them better. This book is aimed at hackers of all skill levels and explains the classical principles and techniques behind beautiful designs by deconstructing those designs in order to understand what makes them so remarkable. Author and designer David Kadavy provides you with the framework for understanding good design and places a special emphasis on interactive mediums. You'll explore color theory, the role of proportion and geometry in design, and the relationship between medium and form. Packed with unique reverse engineering design examples, this book inspires and encourages you to discover and create new beauty in a variety of formats. Breaks down and studies the classical principles and techniques behind the creation of beautiful design. Illustrates cultural and contextual considerations in communicating to a specific audience. Discusses why design is important, the purpose of design, the various constraints of design, and how today's fonts are designed with the screen in mind. Dissects the elements of color, size, scale, proportion, medium, and form. Features a unique range of examples, including the graffiti in the ancient city of Pompeii, the lack of the color black in Monet's art, the style and sleekness of the iPhone, and more.By the end of this book, you'll be able to apply the featured design principles to your own web designs, mobile apps, or other digital work.

    Development activities are linked via handoffs between stages as practitioners move through the process. The lifecycle template concept introduced in this book can be tailored to any project environment, from large enterprise system development to commercial products. Whether a student or practitioner, you will come away with knowledge and understanding of how to create and refine interaction designs to ensure a quality user experience.

    Guns, which lead to so much death, work exactly as they’re designed to work. And every time we “improve” their design, they get better at killing. Facebook’s privacy settings, which have outed gay teens to their conservative parents, are working exactly as designed. Their “real names” iniative, which makes it easier for stalkers to re-find their victims, is working exactly as designed. Twitter’s toxicity and lack of civil discourse is working exactly as it’s designed to work.The world is working exactly as designed. And it’s not working very well. Which means we need to do a better job of designing it. Design is a craft with an amazing amount of power. The power to choose. The power to influence. As designers, we need to see ourselves as gatekeepers of what we are bringing into the world, and what we choose not to bring into the world. Design is a craft with responsibility. The responsibility to help create a better world for all.Design is also a craft with a lot of blood on its hands. Every cigarette ad is on us. Every gun is on us. Every ballot that a voter cannot understand is on us. Every time social network’s interface allows a stalker to find their victim, that’s on us. The monsters we unleash into the world will carry your name.This book will make you see that design is a political act. What we choose to design is a political act. Who we choose to work for is a political act. Who we choose to work with is a political act. And, most importantly, the people we’ve excluded from these decisions is the biggest (and stupidest) political act we’ve made as a society.If you’re a designer, this book might make you angry. It should make you angry. But it will also give you the tools you need to make better decisions. You will learn how to evaluate the potential benefits and harm of what you’re working on. You’ll learn how to present your concerns. You’ll learn the importance of building and working with diverse teams who can approach problems from multiple points-of-view. You’ll learn how to make a case using data and good storytelling. You’ll learn to say NO in a way that’ll make people listen. But mostly, this book will fill you with the confidence to do the job the way you always wanted to be able to do it. This book will help you understand your responsibilities.

    It addresses how people deal with words, read images, explore physical space, think about time and motion, and how actions and responses affect human behavior. Various disciplines make up interaction design, such as industrial design, cognitive psychology, user interface design and many others. It is my hope that this book is a starting point for creating a visual language to enhance the understanding of interdisciplinary theories within interaction design. The book uses concise descriptions, visual metaphors and comparative diagrams to explain each term's meaning. Many ideas in this book are based on timeless principles that will function in varying contexts.

    Very few in the industry can show you the ins and outs of CSS like Eric Meyer and inside Smashing CSS Eric provides techniques that are thorough, utterly useful, and universally applicable in the real world. From choosing the right tools, to CSS effects and CSS3 techniques with jQuery, Smashing CSS is the practical guide to building modern web layouts.With Smashing CSS you will learn how to:Throw elements offscreen/hide them Create body/HTML backgrounds in XHTML Usemore than 15 layout techniques including clearfix, two/three simple columns, faux columns, One True Layout, Holy Grail, em-based layout, fluid grids, sticky footers, and more Use a variety of CSS effects including CSS popups, boxpunching, rounded corners, CSS sprites, Sliding Doors, Liquid Bleach, ragged floats, and more Apply CSS table styling including using thead, tfoot, and tbody, row headers, column-oriented styling (classes); styling data tables with jQuery, tables to graphs, tables to maps; and more Use CSS3 elements including rounded corners, multiple backgrounds, RGBA, using jQuery to do CSS3 selections and so much more. Eric Meyer is an internationally recognized expert on the subjects of HTML, CSS, and Web standards, and has been working on the Web since 1993. Smashing CSS is for developers who already have some experience with CSS and JavaScript and are ready for more advanced techniques.Smashing Magazine (smashingmagazine.com) is one of the world's most popular web design sites. True to the Smashing mission, the Smashing Magazine book series delivers useful and innovative information to Web designers and developers.

    The

    Whether it's organising content, providing clear descriptions or ways for people to get to them, this book is armed with practical advice and examples.

    Designers are no different, but there are not many resources available that concentrate on these necessary soft-skills. This book provides practical and actionable insights to help your team give and receive constructive criticism. For managers, this book discusses proven tools to set a foundation for your team to stay focused on overall goals, and how to handle negative critiques. As an added bonus, the book also includes a Critique Cheat Sheet so you can quickly reference strategies and tools from top industry experts.

    In this book for designers, developers, and product managers, expert developer and user interface designer Lukas Mathis explains how to make usability the cornerstone of every point in your design process, walking you through the necessary steps to plan the design for an application or website, test it, and get usage data after the design is complete. He shows you how to focus your design process on the most important thing: helping people get things done, easily and efficiently. The author presents a collection of valuable tips - organized in four distinct parts, filled with clever illustrations, and supported by fascinating psychological research. He teaches techniques that help you plan and evaluate your user interface design, and inspires you to look at design in a whole new way. He tells you exactly what to look for, and what to avoid, in creating applications and websites that people will be excited to use.

    The goal of the book is to share the techniques of the best companies. This book is aimed primarily at Product Managers working on technology-powered products. That includes the hundreds of "tech companies" like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and the like, as well as the thousands of companies moving to leverage technology (financial companies, media companies, retailers, manufacturers, nearly every industry). Inspired covers companies from early stage start-ups to large, established companies. The products might be consumer products or devices, business services for small businesses to enterprises, internal tools, and developer platforms.Inspired is secondarily aimed at the designers, engineers, user researchers and data scientists that work closely with the product managers on product teams at these same companies.

    Boasting a full-color interior packed with design and layout examples, this book teaches you how to understand a user's needs, divulges techniques for exceeding a user's expectations, and provides a host of hard won advice for improving the overall quality of a user's experience. World-renowned UX guru Eric Reiss shares his knowledge from decades of experience making products useable for everyone...all in an engaging, easy-to-apply manner.Reveals proven tools that simply make products better, from the users' perspective Provides simple guidelines and checklists to help you evaluate and improve your own products Zeroes in on essential elements to consider when planning a product, such as its functionality and responsiveness, whether or not it is ergonomic, making it foolproof, and more Addresses considerations for product clarity, including its visibility, understandability, logicalness, consistency, and predictability Usable Usability walks you through numerous techniques that will help ensure happy customers and successful products!