Nick’s Top User Experience Books for 2014.
Why I detest the term “Lean UX” Any user experience designer worth their salt takes the needs of the company they’re serving into account and adapts their approach accordingly — identifying the appropriate process, methods and tools to get the job done. This has been the case for as long as information architecture and interaction design have been in practice. Rigid methodology — doing the same exact thing every time despite the context — is, and has always been, bad practice.
Now that Eric Ries’s lean startup and Steve Blank’s customer development methodologies have gained significant traction within the startup and wider business communities, the value that user experience design practices can bring to an organization is finally being recognized. While the techniques are being called different things (and aren’t they always?)
, VCs and founders are at long last starting to focus on the user as a means to make the best design decisions for their product and the best strategy decisions for their business. Related Posts: The Secret to Designing an Intuitive UX: Match the Mental Model to the Conceptual Model. Imagine that you’ve never seen an iPad, but I’ve just handed one to you and told you that you can read books on it. Before you turn on the iPad, before you use it, you have a model in your head of what reading a book on the iPad will be like. You have assumptions about what the book will look like on the screen, what things you will be able to do, and how you will do them—things like turning a page, or using a bookmark. You have a “mental model” of reading a book on the iPad, even if you’ve never done it before.
What that mental model in your head looks and acts like depends on a lot of things If you’ve used an iPad before, your mental model of reading a book on an iPad will be different than that of someone who has never used one, or doesn’t even know what iPads are. Mental models have been around for a long time I’ve been talking about mental models (and their counterparts, conceptual models, which we’ll get to shortly) since the 1980s. Just how long? So what is a mental model, then? A Look Inside Mobile Design Patterns. Patterns for mobile application design Design patterns for mobile are emerging as the platform matures. Theresa Neil’s new book Mobile Design Pattern Gallery provides solutions to common design challenges. Read a sample chapter on Invitations and learn how to immediately engage your customers with your application. We recently had a new mobile project starting and all of our experienced mobile designers were booked.
These 70 patterns, illustrated with hundreds of examples from iOS, BlackBerry, Android, Symbian, Windows and webOS applications, will be released this month from O’Reilly Media as the “Mobile Design Pattern Gallery”. *Although these patterns are based on best practices in mobile application design, they may also be inspiring for mobile web design. Invitations Do you remember the first time you used Photoshop? Phototshop 5.5 Well, I assumed the tools were powerful, but didn’t know for sure. Fast forward a decade or so.
Layar Reality Browser (early version) Dialog Tip Tour Video Demo. User interface design.
Cyoa. As a child of the 80s, the Choose Your Own Adventure books were a fixture of my rainy afternoons. My elementary school library kept a low, fairly unmaintained-looking shelf of them hidden in one of its back corners. Whether this non-marquee placement was an attempt by the librarians to deemphasize the books in favor of ‘serious’ (children’s) literature or was simply my good luck I still haven’t worked out. But it meant there was a place that I could retreat to and dive into unfamiliar worlds without distraction. A lot of what I read in those days served a similar purpose. A narrative was all well and good, but more interesting to me were the books that laid out a set of places and situations that could outlive their attendant plots — stories that provided scaffolding for my own imagining. Imagination is a wonderful thing, but it’s a decidedly one-sided affair. Historically, reference books have made use of this aspect most directly.
Place all the pages (loose) in a mess on the floor.