Universal Methods of Design serves as an invaluable compendium of methods that can be easily referenced and used by cross-disciplinary teams in nearly any design project.   Methods and techniques are organized alphabetically for ongoing, quick reference. Each method is presented in a two-page format. The left-hand page contains a concise description of the method, accompanied by references for further reading. On the right-hand page, images and cases studies for each method are presented visually. The relevant phases for design application are highlighted as numbered icons along the right side of the page, from phases 1 (planning) through 5 (launch and monitor).Build more meaningful products with these methods and more: A/B Testing, Affinity Diagramming, Behavioral Mapping, Bodystorming, Contextual Design, Critical Incident Technique, Directed Storytelling, Flexible Modeling, Image Boards, Graffiti Walls, Heuristic Evaluation, Parallel Prototyping, Simulation Exercises, Touchstone Tours, and Weighted Matrix.  This essential guide:Dismantles the myth that user research methods are complicated, expensive, and time-consumingCreates a shared meaning for cross-disciplinary design teamsIllustrates methods with compelling visualizations and case studiesCharacterizes each method at a glanceIndicates when methods are best employed to help prioritize appropriate design research strategiesUniversal Methods of Design is an essential resource for designers of all levels and specializations.

    Observing the User Experience will help you bridge that gap to understand what your users want and need from your product, and whether they'll be able to use what you've created.Filled with real-world experience and a wealth of practical information, this book presents a complete toolbox of techniques to help designers and developers see through the eyes of their users. It provides in-depth coverage of 13 user experience research techniques that will provide a basis for developing better products, whether they're Web, software or mobile based. In addition, it's written with an understanding of how software is developed in the real world, taking tight budgets, short schedules, and existing processes into account.

    The book provides proven and practical advice that will help you avoid pitfalls, and produce forms that are aesthetically pleasing, efficient and cost-effective. It features invaluable design methods, tips, and tricks to help ensure accurate data and satisfied customers. It includes dozens of examples - from nitty-gritty details (label alignment, mandatory fields) to visual designs (creating good grids, use of color).This book isn't just about colons and choosing the right widgets. It's about the whole process of making good forms, which has a lot more to do with making sure you're asking the right questions in a way that your users can answer than it does with whether you use a drop-down list or radio buttons. In an easy-to-read format with lots of examples, the authors present their three-layer model - relationship, conversation, appearance. You need all three for a successful form - a form that looks good, flows well, asks the right questions in the right way, and, most important of all, gets people to fill it out. Liberally illustrated with full-color examples, this book guides readers on how to define requirements, how to write questions that users will understand and want to answer, and how to deal with instructions, progress indicators and errors.This book is essential reading for HCI professionals, web designers, software developers, user interface designers, HCI academics and students, market research professionals, and financial professionals.

    We've embraced it in the boardroom, the bedroom, and the bathroom.Screens have taken over our lives. Most people spend over eight hours a day staring at a screen, and some "technological innovators" are hoping to grab even more of your eyeball time. You have screens in your pocket, in your car, on your appliances, and maybe even on your face. Average smartphone users check their phones 150 times a day, responding to the addictive buzz of Facebook or emails or Twitter.Are you sick? There's an app for that! Need to pray? There's an app for that! Dead? Well, there's an app for that, too! And most apps are intentionally addictive distractions that end up taking our attention away from things like family, friends, sleep, and oncoming traffic.There's a better way.In this book, innovator Golden Krishna challenges our world of nagging, screen-based bondage, and shows how we can build a technologically advanced world without digital interfaces.In his insightful, raw, and often hilarious criticism, Golden reveals fascinating ways to think beyond screens using three principles that lead to more meaningful innovation. Whether you're working in technology, or just wary of a gadget-filled future, you'll be enlighted and entertained while discovering that the best interface is no interface.

    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.

    Ironically, I must recommend that you read her every word so that you can find out why your customers won't read very many words on your website -- and what to do about it.-- Jakob Nielsen, Principal, Nielsen Norman Group"There are at least twelve billion web pages out there. Twelve billion voices talking, but saying mostly nothing. If just 1% of those pages followed Ginny's practical, clear advice, the world would be a better place. Fortunately, you can follow her advice for 100% of your own site's pages, so pick up a copy of Letting Go of the Words and start communicating effectively today."--Lou Rosenfeld, co-author, Information Architecture for the World Wide WebOn the web, whether on the job or at home, we usually want to grab information and use it quickly. We go to the web to get answers to questions or to complete tasks - to gather information, reading only what we need. We are all too busy to read much on the web.This book helps you write successfully for web users. It offers strategy, process, and tactics for creating or revising content for the web. It helps you plan, organize, write, design, and test web content that will make web users come back again and again to your site.Learn how to create usable and useful content for the web from the master - Ginny Redish. Ginny has taught and mentored hundreds of writers, information designers, and content owners in the principles and secrets of creating web information that is easy to scan, easy to read, and easy to use.This practical, informative book will help anyone creating web content do it better.Features* Clearly-explained guidelines with full color illustrations and examples from actual web sites throughout the book. * Written in easy-to-read style with many befores and afters.* Specific guidelines for web-based press releases, legal notices, and other documents.* Tips on making web content accessible for people with special needs.Janice (Ginny) Redish has been helping clients and colleagues communicate clearly for more than 20 years. For the past ten years, her focus has been helping people create usable and useful web sites. She is co-author of two classic books on usability: A Practical Guide to Usability Testing (with Joseph Dumas), and User and Task Analysis for Interface Design (with JoAnn Hackos), and is the recipient of many awards.

    It should be labelled 'start here'." --Pieter Jan Stappers, ID-StudioLab, Delft University of Technology

    With this book, new UX designers will learn the practical skills they need to get started in the field, skills that can be immediately applied to real-world UX projects. "UX for Beginners" is broken into one hundred short, illustrated lessons, a user-friendly approach that makes learning fun and gives you the foundation you need to succeed as a UX designer. This book is based on the popular UX Crash Course blog at The Hipper Element, which has more than 400,000 readers."

    A simple, easy-to-follow guide, illustrated with plenty of full-color examples, this book will lead you through the process of creating great designs from start to finish. Good design principles are not rocket science, and using the information contained in this book will help you create stunning web sites.Understand the design process, from discovery to implementation Understand what makes "good design" Developing pleasing layouts using grids, the rule of thirds, balance and symmetry Use color effectively, develop color schemes and create a palette Use textures, lines, points, shapes, volumes and depth Learn how good typography can make ordinary designs look great Effective imagery: choosing, editing and placing images And much more Throughout the book, you'll follow an example design, from concept to completion, learning along the way. The book's full-color layout and large format (8" x 10") make The Principles Of Beautiful Wed Design a pleasure to read.Editorial Reviews"The Principles of Beautiful Web Design is a good book to kick start your graphic-design journey. The biggest benefit that I got from this book is the knowledge to learn from great designs as opposed to just admiring them in a state of awe." - Slashdot.org"Jason is a great writer, and the book is quite easy to read. It's put together wonderfully, including many full color screenshots and other forms of imagery that make the book a pleasure to read. I'd definitely recommend the book to anyone in Web design." - MondayByNoon"Jason Beaird covers web design in a way that non-designers can understand. He walks you through all of the aspects of design development from initial meeting to finished product. If you are just getting into web development, this is a must read." - Blogcritics.org"This is a thoroughly practical guide to web design that is very well written: good technical depth in easy-to-understand language with excellent illustrations and graphics that support the text. For many users it will be the only web-design text they will need. For those who want to further advance their skills and knowledge it will provide a sound foundation." - PC Update"His "Don't just tell, show!" style makes this book accessible to everyone... It strikes a carefully thought-out balance between describing principles and illustrating them. It is clear and well structured, with practical examples in every chapter." - Mitch Wheat

    But this book offers more. It provides important insights into both what can go right and what can go wrong in a product offering. To make great products, we need to understand what makes some fail and others succeed. To all the aspiring, young entrepreneurs who are reading this: take heed. Embrace failure to learn from failure. Learn from failure to avoid failure." —Don Norman Co-founder, Nielsen Norman Group Author of The Design of Everyday Things (Revised and Expanded) Just as pilots and doctors improve by studying crash reports and postmortems, experience designers can improve by learning how customer experience failures cause products to fail in the marketplace. Rather than proselytizing a particular approach to design, Why We Fail holistically explores what teams actually built, why the products failed, and how we can learn from the past to avoid failure ourselves.Why We Fail will help you:1. Understand the key mistakes other teams have made so you don't repeat them2. Turn unavoidable failures into building blocks to be successful3. Create a team environment where failures are controlled and valuable

    Approaching persuasive design from the dark side, this book melds psychology, marketing, and design concepts to show why we're susceptible to certain persuasive techniques. Packed with examples from every nook and cranny of the web, it provides easily digestible and applicable patterns for putting these design techniques to work. Organized by the seven deadly sins, it includes:Pride -- use social proof to position your product in line with your visitors' values Sloth -- build a path of least resistance that leads users where you want them to go Gluttony -- escalate customers' commitment and use loss aversion to keep them there Anger -- understand the power of metaphysical arguments and anonymity Envy -- create a culture of status around your product and feed aspirational desires Lust -- turn desire into commitment by using emotion to defeat rational behavior Greed -- keep customers engaged by reinforcing the behaviors you desire Now you too can leverage human fallibility to create powerful persuasive interfaces that people will love to use -- but will you use your new knowledge for good or evil? Learn more on the companion website, evilbydesign.info.

    You'll get several case studies, including Airbnb, along with interviews with UX strategists from different work environments (startup, agency, and enterprise) about their roles and experience.With this book, UX designers, product stakeholders, and startup founders will learn how to: • Conduct a competitive analysis on the online marketplace• Perform guerrilla user research for your MVP• Design for conversion and develop a funnel matrix for understanding customer acquisition• Extract innovative online opportunities from market research• Validate customer research with continuous feedback loops• Adapt traditional and contemporary business approaches (such as Lean Startup) to implement a successful strategy

    With tons of examples from real-world interfaces and a touch of the underlying social psychology theory, Joshua Porter shows you how to design your next great social web application.

    The ability to effectively articulate design decisions is critical to the success of a project, because the most articulate person often wins. This practical book provides principles, tactics, and actionable methods for talking about designs with executives, managers, developers, marketers, and other stakeholders who have influence over the project with the goal of winning them over and creating the best user experience.

    Although dashboards are potentially powerful, this potential is rarely realized. The greatest display technology in the world won't solve this if you fail to use effective visual design. And if a dashboard fails to tell you precisely what you need to know in an instant, you'll never use it, even if it's filled with cute gauges, meters, and traffic lights. Don't let your investment in dashboard technology go to waste.This book will teach you the visual design skills you need to create dashboards that communicate clearly, rapidly, and compellingly. Information Dashboard Design will explain how to:Avoid the thirteen mistakes common to dashboard design Provide viewers with the information they need quickly and clearly Apply what we now know about visual perception to the visual presentation of information Minimize distractions, cliches, and unnecessary embellishments that create confusion Organize business information to support meaning and usability Create an aesthetically pleasing viewing experience Maintain consistency of design to provide accurate interpretation Optimize the power of dashboard technology by pairing it with visual effectiveness Stephen Few has over 20 years of experience as an IT innovator, consultant, and educator. As Principal of the consultancy Perceptual Edge, Stephen focuses on data visualization for analyzing and communicating quantitative business information. He provides consulting and training services, speaks frequently at conferences, and teaches in the MBA program at the University of California in Berkeley. He is also the author of Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten. Visit his website at www.perceptualedge.com.