Distinctive Design: A Practical Guide to a Useful, Beautiful Web Review

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Distinctive Design: A Practical Guide to a Useful, Beautiful Web ReviewThe purpose of this book is to discuss what makes for good web designs. Much of it is closely related to material on design principles for other media, such as the printed page as for most cases, good design is good design. The author takes another step with respect to web design and discusses topics particular to the web, though, such as how a page appears in different browsers, the effect of add-ins and third party applications, and also spends a good amount of time discussing web design for the latest devices such as mobile, smaller screens, etc.
The topics/chapters are well laid out, the book is easy to read, and the author does a great job at covering the various principles and concepts of good design. Is there unique content to the book? Not really; there are lots of other good books on design out there but this compares favorably with them. It is a good all-in-one reference and I felt it is a useful and practical read - for laymen like me it has a bunch of good ideas. I've read most of them before but it is always good to have a refresher, and just reading the text gives me pointers and reminders of things to make sure I incorporate.
There is an emphasis on making pages user-friendly and ensuring you convey the proper message of the page. It's a practical book. As I mentioned before, the author also emphasizes designing for the latest devices - smart phones, etc., which have a more limited screen space and you have to make sure your message is effective and communicates properly. As another reviewer stated, this is not a book with ready-made templates to try out, or stuff that gets you started right away on a ready-to-go web site. It is a book filled with concepts and principles of good design, applied to the web and as such, the author has written a very useful book.Distinctive Design: A Practical Guide to a Useful, Beautiful Web OverviewLearn to produce a web site that stands out from the crowd
One of the web designer's greatest challenges is to create a site distinctive enough to get noticed among the millions of sites already on the web. This book examines the bond between code, content and visuals to guide you through the factors that increase your design's visibility, usability and beauty. Using this practical advice, even web designers who lack strong artistic skills can develop super sites that strengthen the message and stand out from the crowd.
Most books focus primarily on graphic design principles; this one shows you how to maximize and prioritize every design decision to help your site achieve its primary purpose: showcasing your content and services
Explores the bond between code, content and visuals to guide you through the factors that increase your design's visibility, usability and beauty
Enables even artistically challenged web designers to create elegant, functional layouts that attract visitors and are user-friendly

Every web designer can benefit from this practical advice on creating an informative, attractive, easy-to-use site that gets noticed.

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ReviewThis book lays a good foundation for web design by emphasizing planning, meeting clients' goals, and understanding the target audience. Wroblewski emphasizes usability when describing the core of the site- structure, navigation, content- and how it will affect the experience of the audience. He uses numerous examples to illustrate layout, visual heirarchy, color schemes, and how they work together (or don't!) to communicate quickly and effectively to the site visitor.
I got frustrated about the amount of fluff surrounding actual information. He makes plenty of good points and then buries them beneath a barrage of condescending, long-winded metaphors, like the way we can read a map and know that blue represents water. The analogy itself could be helpful, but three paragraphs to explain the analogy is just distracting.
I'm glad I read it... it opened my eyes to many challenges that web designers face, and inspired me to infuse life and personality into my own site. I'm also glad I highlighted the meaningful parts so I (or friends who borrow it) can skip past the fluff in the future. OverviewAlthough Web usability has received lots of hype, especially during the dot-com meltdown, the focus has been mostly on technical issues. Usability experts stress the pitfalls of frames and too many images on Web pages. They recommend editing out unnecessary words and writing in a non-linear style-all valuable advice, of course. But less frequently do they highlight the importance of the visual presentation of Web pages.The Web is a communication medium that does most of its talking visually. What you see on a Web page tells you what you might find within the site, how to get there, and why it might interest you-not to mention the instinctive emotional response that shapes your Web experience. As a result, Web usability issues are communication issues. Easy-to-use sites are those that communicate quickly and effectively.Site-Seeing takes a fresh approach to Web usability by applying visual communication principles and decision-making to Web design. Specifically, readers will learn the key concepts behind visual organization, look and feel, technical considerations, and clear planning that stem from audience awareness. Through numerous, full-color examples author Luke Wroblewski deconstructs "the good, the bad, and the ugly" of Web design.The visual presentation of a site does more than merely making it pretty. It organizes information according to function. It creates distinct and appropriate personalities. It provides emotional impact and attachment. In short, it engages the audience-and keeps them coming back.

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Effective UI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software Review

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Effective UI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software ReviewThis invaluable review of the Processes & Business Benefits of User Interface/User Experience Design, provides so much unique and hard won insight into the process of developing superior user interfaces, the goals of users and the business, and in quantifying the benefits of UX design that I can only award it an outstanding Five Star review. One observation, that full engagement with the true goals of users is the end purpose of UI Design, is in itself worth the cost of this excellent book. But in spite of my viewing this book as revolutionary and offering outstanding and unique insights into what User Experience is, how to achieve it and what its benefits are, I do have one major criticism of this otherwise excellent book, its narrative approach and careful explication of its arguments on what the team at "Effective UI" lead to step by step discovery of these insights; there doesn't appear to be a top-down structure allowing for easy browsing of the book; it must be studied at length. Also, an experienced student of Interaction Design and User Experience cannot easily find what the new insights of this book are at a single glance, or find its prescription for a particular step of the design process.
This is an excellent and insightful book on UI Design and User Experience based on the consulting experience of a leading firm in this industry. But the book narrating their experience must be studied, it is difficult to browse.
--Ira Laefsky
MSE, MBA IT & HCI ResearcherEffective UI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software Overview
People expect effortless, engaging interaction with desktop and web applications, but producing software that generates enjoyable user experiences is much harder than many companies anticipate. With Effective UI, you'll learn proven user-experience strategies that will satisfy your clients and customers, drive business value, and increase brand strength.

This book shows you how to capture the collaborative and cooperative spirit among designers, engineers, and management required for building engaging software. You'll also learn valuable methods for maintaining focus throughout the process -- whether you're a product manager who needs a clear roadmap, a developer or designer looking for guidance and advocacy, or a businessperson who wants to understand and manage user-experience software initiatives.

Learn how to build software that will:

Generate engaging and interactive experiences between consumers and businesses, or between businesspeople and their information systems
Account for how people work with, think about, and consume information
Establish a richer means of collaboration and communication
Reduce frustration by streamlining complex tasks and creating processes that are more intuitive
Distinguish products, services, and brands to create a competitive advantage
Create scalable systems that adapt to changing user needs and behaviors


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Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions Review

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Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions ReviewIf you are brand spanking new to web design, and have never coded a single site, you may want to hold off on this book for a minute. I'm not saying it is not for beginners, because it is. Those new to HTML and CSS may want to get the hang of that before jumping into incorporating Ajax and JavaScript along with advanced CSS techniques.
Who is it for? I would recommend this book for art directors, project managers, web designers (all levels), interactive designers, DVD menu designers (though not directly related, you can still take away some important aspects or "patterns"), and especially those that design online training modules (we all know how dull they can be.) Like the DVD menu designers I mentioned above, I think Flash designers can benefit greatly, as well. Though the book is not directly geared toward Flash design, the patterns and "anti-patterns" talked about can easily be used when designing for a Flash experience.
The layout of the book is broken up into the 6 "principles" described in the product description of this book. The sections "Make It Direct" and "Stay on the Page" are by far the two largest sections, for they are the most important of the 6. "Keep it Lightweight" is the shortest section/principle, but by no means is rushed or glossed over. It poses some great design ideas to keep it intuitive, discoverable and keep you from designing 'mouse traps.'
In order to get the most out of this book, you would have to have designed a web site before reading this book. If you are a project manager or art director in charge of a team designing a web site (but not a web designer yourself), it would benefit you greatly to have a general understanding of web design, HTML, what Ajax is, CSS, cross-browser compatibilities, and Javascript. If you are just managing a team, you do NOT have to know how to code these languages/techniques, but in order to really benefit form this book, it would be better if you generally know what each does.
This book could also help bridge the gap for some managers by equipping them with the correct terminology of web design. Just speaking the language of user interface design can help speed up the time it takes to turn your directions into an interface that works the way you intended.
The book is detailed and to the point of the benefits of discoverability and weighing your options in the case of just how intuitive you need to make the interface. This book does not read like a my-way-or-the-highway kind of book. Scott mentions the potential pitfalls, disadvantages and possible alternate scenarios that depend on your interactive goals as set by the audience visiting your site.
A good number of the examples are from Yahoo! and Netflix sites (because Scott used to work for Yahoo! and now works for Netflix), but I never once felt like it was an advertisement for either one. He manages to spread the love around and uses examples from the Gap, iPhone, blogs, Google, Amazon, and others.
In short, the book is an easy read, something that one could go through in a long weekend. There are screenshots and visual examples on virtually every page, so in no way are we left to imagine the event happening. Multiple screenshots are taken when the event happens over the period of several steps. There is even a couple free companion web sites that will show the screenshots in a larger format than the book would allow. While reading the book, you will undoubtedly have many 'ah ha!' moments, or times when you rush to check your previously-designed web sites to see if you need to make a correction to your interface (admit it, we all do.)
I highly recommend this book for anyone that designs interfaces, even if they are for mp3 players, touch screens for electronics, or those interactive lobby displays. We all need some help in the area of user interface design.
***NOTE: there is NO code in this book. This the theory of designing user interfaces for the web, NOT the code.Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions Overview
Want to learn how to create great user experiences on today's Web? In this book, UI experts Bill Scott and Theresa Neil present more than 75 design patterns for building web interfaces that provide rich interaction. Distilled from the authors' years of experience at Sabre, Yahoo!, and Netflix, these best practices are grouped into six key principles to help you take advantage of the web technologies available today. With an entire section devoted to each design principle, Designing Web Interfaces helps you:

Make It Direct-Edit content in context with design patterns for In Page Editing, Drag & Drop, and Direct Selection
Keep It Lightweight-Reduce the effort required to interact with a site by using In Context Tools to leave a "light footprint"
Stay on the Page-Keep visitors on a page with overlays, inlays, dynamic content, and in-page flow patterns
Provide an Invitation-Help visitors discover site features with invitations that cue them to the next level of interaction
Use Transitions-Learn when, why, and how to use animations, cinematic effects, and other transitions
React Immediately-Provide a rich experience by using lively responses such as Live Search, Live Suggest, Live Previews, and more

Designing Web Interfaces illustrates many patterns with examples from working websites. If you need to build or renovate a website to be truly interactive, this book gives you the principles for success.


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A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making Review

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A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making ReviewA Project Guide to UX Design is a book that defines the micro and macroscopic views of user experience design and its role in the project life cycle. Russ and Carolyn do a great job of reiterating what the core of user experience design is as well as identifying the different roles that utilize it. The book covers a lot of ground and takes a transcendental approach of showing the underlying purpose for each role in order to promote a synthetic comprehension of user experience design as opposed to shallow memorization.
The main target audience of the book are Information Architects, Interaction Designers, User Researchers, and other project stakeholders (Business Analysts, Content Strategists, Copywriters, Visual Designers, and Front-end Developers).
To make the contents more inviting, I've created an enclosing outline to provide abstract classifications for several groups of chapters. Each number represents the number of pages in each chapter:
+ Introduction
- Chapter 1: The Tao of UXD (8)
- Chapter 2: The Project Ecosystem (29)
+ Business Perspective
- Chapter 3: Proposals for Consultants and Freelancers (15)
- Chapter 4: Project Objectives and Approach (10)
- Chapter 5: Business Requirements (15)
+ Research
- Chapter 6: User Research (26)
- Chapter 7: Personas (13)
- Chapter 8: User Experience Design and SEO (17)
+ Information Architecture / Interaction Design
- Chapter 9: Transition from Defining to Designing (18)
- Chapter 10: Site Maps and Task Flows (17)
- Chapter 11: Wireframes and Annotations (17)
- Chapter 12: Prototyping (15)
- Chapter 13: Design testing with Users (25)
- Chapter 14: Transition: From Design to Development and Beyond (10)
The book also contains frequent references to books, online resources, and user experience groups and authors throughout as opposed to an Appendix or a 'For further reading' section nested in the back. This helps to drive home the thoughts as you read them, rather than 'when you are finished'.
As an aspiring user experience professional, I do believe that this book is worth owning, reading, and referencing as a compass to create effective user experience in any project setting.A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making Overview"If you are a young designer entering or contemplating entering the UX field this is a canonical book. If you are an organization that really needs to start grokking UX this book is also for you. " -- Chris Bernard, User Experience Evangelist, MicrosoftUser experience design is the discipline of creating a useful and usable Web site or application—one that's easily navigated and meets the needs of both the site owner and its users. But there's a lot more to successful UX design than knowing the latest Web technologies or design trends: It takes diplomacy, project management skills, and business savvy. That's where this book comes in. Authors Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler show you how to integrate UX principles into your project from start to finish.• Understand the various roles in UX design, identify stakeholders, and enlist their support• Obtain consensus from your team on project objectives• Define the scope of your project and avoid mission creep• Conduct user research and document your findings• Understand and communicate user behavior with personas• Design and prototype your application or site• Make your product findable with search engine optimization• Plan for development, product rollout, and ongoing quality assurance

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Undercover User Experience Design (Voices That Matter) Review

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Undercover User Experience Design (Voices That Matter) ReviewIn the past few years, I have read many UX books, and most of them were either extremely boring or very badly written, so I approached this one with a lot of cynicism. Luckily, it is neither boring nor badly written: it actually has a very good pace, talks about most aspects of User Experience just in the right length, and maintains a tone throughout that relaxes you and makes you feel that you're actually doing something that you enjoy.
The authors maintain the position that some UX work in design is better than none, and show ways how research, design and production can be influenced by User Experience work (performed by you, the reader) without big budgets or a sense of perfectionism.
Having worked in various companies large and small for UX teams both successfully and unsuccessfully, I found that the relaxed approach by the authors resonated with me. It's a bit like books by Steve Krug, but less descriptive in what needs to be done. "Undercover User Experience Design" rather gives you a range of possibilities to tackle problems along the way, and it's up to the user which one to pick. The book quite masterfully describes the techniques with just the right amount of detail: if you're okay with a bit of uncertainty, you can probably do the exercises straight away, but if you're a bit anxious because you've never done it before, the book gives you plenty of leads to follow up on.
I rarely recommend a book for both beginners in UX and seasoned professionals, but I felt that it spoke very well to both parties: beginners get a 5-star introduction into what can be done, a bit of how-to as well, while professionals can use it as a quick-reference guide in case they hit a snag somewhere in their projects.
Oh, and it's under 200 pages, which makes it much more likely for you to actually read ;-)Undercover User Experience Design (Voices That Matter) OverviewOnce you catch the user experience bug, the world changes. Doors open the wrong way, websites don't work, and companies don't seem to care. And while anyone can learn the UX remedies usability testing, personas, prototyping and so on unless your organization 'gets it', putting them into practice is trickier. Undercover User Experience is a pragmatic guide from the front lines, giving frank advice on making UX work in real companies with real problems. Readers will learn how to fit research, ideation, prototyping and testing into their daily workflow, and how to design good user experiences under the all-too-common constraints of time, budget and culture.

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