Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web
Language: English
Pages: 325
ISBN: 1680501607
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book is for designers, developers, and product managers who are charged with what sometimes seems like an impossible task: making sure products work the way your users expect them to. You'll find out how to design applications and websites that people will not only use, but will absolutely love. The second edition brings the book up to date and expands it with three completely new chapters.
Interaction design - the way the apps on our phones work, the way we enter a destination into our car's GPS - is becoming more and more important. Identify and fix bad software design by making usability the cornerstone of your design process.
Lukas weaves together hands-on techniques and fundamental concepts. Each technique chapter explains a specific approach you can use to make your product more user friendly, such as storyboarding, usability tests, and paper prototyping. Idea chapters are concept-based: how to write usable text, how realistic your designs should look, when to use animations. This new edition is updated and expanded with new chapters covering requirements gathering, how the design of data structures influences the user interface, and how to do design work as a team. Through copious illustrations and supporting psychological research, expert developer and user interface designer Lukas Mathis gives you a deep dive into research, design, and implementation--the essential stages in designing usable interfaces for applications and websites.
Lukas inspires you to look at design in a whole new way, explaining exactly what to look for - and what to avoid - in creating products that get people excited.
Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web
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benefit: it forces you to explain how your product works. Few things make you think about the details of your design quite as much as having to describe how to use it; if something is hard to explain, it’s probably hard to use and in need of rethinking. So, how do you go about writing a manual? Look at the manual as part of your product. A great manual is a useful feature; maintain it the same way you maintain other features. (If you’re writing code as well as the manual, check the manual into
usually seems to fix the problem. But this doesn’t just apply to text in pop-up messages. People skip text whenever they think they can get away with it. 6.3 Say Less Since people don’t read, it’s best to avoid bothering them with text whenever possible. For example, don’t warn people when they are about to do something destructive. Instead, allow them to undo their change. Similarly, if an error occurs and you have a way to make your product recover on its own without telling the user, do it.
this copy is (P1.1a printing, July 2011) 64 P REPARING FOR A C ARD S OR T 8.2 Preparing for a Card Sort To prepare for a sort, you simply take a bunch of index cards and put the things you need to sort on them. For example, if you’re structuring a website, you represent the individual pages or areas of your website as the individual cards to sort. If you’re structuring an application, you use the names of features, properties, menu items, commands, windows, tasks, goals, or visible elements
Radial Context Menus Decrease Average Distance As mentioned, corners are especially easy to hit, because they have two infinite edges. There is, however, one point on the screen that is even easier to hit: the point below the cursor. You don’t have to move the mouse at all to hit it. Context menus make use of this. If a menu pops up below the mouse cursor, it makes sense to arrange the individual menu entries around the mouse cursor to decrease the average distance to each entry. One way to
and others prefer to have the list at the top of the view. Item 1 Item 2 Item 3 Item 1 Item 2 Item 3 In reality, there is one solution that works best for most people. It’s your job to find that solution. You can do usability tests with different configurations of your product and see which one really works best. Your users can’t. Fourth, leaving the choice up to the user also means you’ll have to support several different ways of using your product for the rest of its lifetime. If you pick one