There are so many interesting UX books coming out that it’s hard to know which ones are worth your money. So from now on we will try and be your guide. Each month we will share with you our opinion on the newest UX books. And as a bonus we will add a classic you must have.
This month we review Card Sorting, Designing Social Interfaces, Thoughts on Interaction Design, and revisit The Inmates Are Running The Asylum. … »
Overpromise and Overdeliver is a book on how to design and deliver customer experiences in order to create ‘unshakable customer loyalty’. Now the title does make one think this is yet another book trying to convey a theory on how to be the most successful company in the industry, and that assumption is completely right. We’ve seen a lot of them in the last couple of years, which made me wonder; does Overpromise and Overdeliver live up to the theory it’s trying to convey, and to which extend is it applicable to design? … »
When I picked up this book I thought it would be a biography of Steve Jobs, and doubted whether this would make an interesting read for interaction designers. But it turns out, it’s very interesting for designers indeed. Obviously, there’s a lot of biographical information in it, but it’s not a chronological story of Steve’s life… It’s a book about Steve Jobs’ vision on products, user experience and innovation. … »
Normally we review books full of design pattern or interaction logic, but this time we’re going more abstract: problem solving. As designers we face complex challenges and have to make loads of decisions, will Problem Solving 101 make this easier? Hopefully. … »
In the wake of the ever increasing popularity of gestural interfaces, Dan Saffer wrote his newest book: Designing Gestural Interfaces. In this publication by O’Reilly he tries to give us some valuable insights. But did he succeed? … »
Beautiful Evidence is Edward R. Tufte’s fourth book on visual evidence. His earlier books about this topic where ‘Visual Explanations’, ‘Envisioning Information’ and the highly praised ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information’. Beautiful Evidence deals with analytical design and is a collection of critically analyzed (and very beautiful) images, principles and pitfalls which apply to everything from MS Powerpoint to sculptures. … »
Everybody wants to design perfect products. And to do this a lot of designers think they’re applying user centered design. But most of the time they’re actually using themselves as reference. Fortunately there are several methodologies which can help you to really understand the target audience. One of them is the creation of mental models, of which Indi Young wrote a book called Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior. … »
“Every Thing Bad Is Good For You” is the title of the book Steven Johnson wrote in 2005. In this book he claims that “Against popular belief, pop culture is actually making us smarter”. And he explains this theory by using the term “The Sleeper Cuve” derived from the movie Sleeper by Woody Allan.
Johnson writes how TV shows have evolved from shows like Dragnet and Starsky & Hutch with a single plot line per episode to shows like The Sopranos and Lost with multiple plot lines intersecting and over 21 episodes. These new shows are challenging us to remember and connect multiple relationships over an entire season instead of just one show. This complexity was unthinkable 20 years ago. But in today’s society its different for we have been secretly trained to accept this complexity for the last decade. This is the Sleeper curve hard at work. … »
