Here are some recommendations for books and links that should be essential reading for everyone interested in interaction design, visual design, usability, and much more. Feel free to comment, add and criticize!
BILL MOOGRIDGE
William (Bill) Moggridge, an industrial and interaction designer, is co-founder of the Silicon Valley-based design firm IDEO and the current director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York. He designed what was the first laptop computer, the GRiD Compass. He advocates applying a user-centered design process in product development cycles and also works towards popularizing interaction design as a mainstream discipline. Read his books Designing Interactions and Designing Media
BILL BUXTON
William Arthur Stewart (Bill) Buxton is a Canadian computer scientist and designer. He is currently a Principal researcher at Microsoft Research. He is known for being one of the pioneers in the human–computer interaction field. Read his book Sketching User Experiences and visit his website Billbuxton.com
BOOKS:
About Face 3
This completely updated volume presents the effective and practical tools you need to design great desktop applications, Web 2.0 sites, and mobile devices. You’ll learn the principles of good product behavior and gain an understanding of Cooper’s Goal-Directed Design method, which involves everything from conducting user research to defining your product using personas and scenarios. Ultimately, you’ll acquire the knowledge to design the best possible digital products and services. Buy this book on Amazon
Simple and Usable
In a complex world, products that are easy to use win favor with consumers. This is the first book on the topic of simplicity aimed specifically at interaction designers. It shows how to drill down and simplify user experiences when designing digital tools and applications. It begins by explaining why simplicity is attractive, explores the laws of simplicity, and presents proven strategies for achieving simplicity. Remove, hide, organize and displace become guidelines for designers, who learn simplicity by seeing before and after examples and case studies where the results speak for themselves. Buy this book on Amazon
User-Centered Interaction Design Patterns for Interactive Digital Television Applications
Technology is meant to make life easier and to raise its quality. Our interaction with technology should be designed according to human needs instead of us being required to adapt to technology. Even so, technology may change quickly and people and their habits change slowly. With the aim of supporting user acceptance of iTV, the focus of this book is on the usability of iTV applications. A method for developing interaction design patterns especially for new technologies is presented for the first time. The main characteristics covered in this new approach are: systematic identification of recurrent design problems; usability as a quality criterion for design solutions; integration of designers into the pattern development process including identification of designers’ needs, and iterative evaluation and optimisation of patterns to encourage designers to accept and use them; usability testing to identify proven design solutions and their trade-offs; presentation of specific design guidelines. Buy this book on Amazon
Don’t Make Me Think
Five years and more than 100,000 copies after it was first published, it’s hard to imagine anyone working in Web design who hasn’t read Steve Krug’s “instant classic” on Web usability, but people are still discovering it every day. In this second edition, Steve adds three new chapters in the same style as the original: wry and entertaining, yet loaded with insights and practical advice for novice and veteran alike. Don’t be surprised if it completely changes the way you think about Web design. With these three new chapters:
- Usability as common courtesy — Why people really leave Web sites
- Web Accessibility, CSS, and you — Making sites usable and accessible
- Help! My boss wants me to ______. — Surviving executive design whims
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
Imagine, at a terrifyingly aggressive rate, everything you regularly use is being equipped with computer technology. Think about your phone, cameras, cars-everything-being automated and programmed by people who in their rush to accept the many benefits of the silicon chip, have abdicated their responsibility to make these products easy to use. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum argues that the business executives who make the decisions to develop these products are not the ones in control of the technology used to create them. Insightful and entertaining, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum uses the author’s experiences in corporate America to illustrate how talented people continuously design bad software-based products and why we need technology to work the way average people think. Somewhere out there is a happy medium that makes these types of products both user and bottom-line friendly; this book discusses why we need to quickly find that medium. Buy this book on Amazon
LINKS
LukeW Ideation + Design
Interakt.nu (in swedish)
UX Design @ smashingmagazine
Boxes and Arrows
Use It
[Thanx to Jonas Norberg, Sai-Kit Cheung and Indir Topcagic]