In this round-up of book reviews we are trying to broaden your perspective a little bit. We review the typical UX books, like ‘Beyond the Usability Lab’ and ‘User Experience Re-Mastered’, but we also try to get inspiration from ‘Innovators’ and ‘Layout Essentials’.

Beyond the Usability Lab

Type: theory
Authors: Bill Albert, Donna Tedesco, Thomas Tullis
Publishers: Morgan Kaufman
ISBN: 978-0123748928
Details: 328 pages, paperback

When you are new to the business and need a hands-on tour through the UX process.

Online usability testing seems to have become ‘the new kid on the block’. In the last few months we’ve received four books from different publishers that all covered this topic. Is it really a topic so complex that it needs several books explaining you how to do it?

Of course you can start directly with online usability testing, gathering valuable information about your users and product. There are enough easy tools to help you along the way (e.g. Loop 11 and Usabilla). But this book does provide some valuable background and guidelines to help you get the best out of your usability tests. It is a very complete guide, containing a lot of valuable information, even more basic information and probably a bunch of information that will never be useful for you.

The book is very clearly written and provides a lot of examples.

Here is an overview of the topics

• An introduction to online usability testing
• Planning the study
• Designing the study
• Piloting and launching the study
• Data preparation
• Data analysis and presentation
• Building your online study using commercial tools
• Discount approaches to building an online study
• Case studies
• Ten Keys To Success

User Experience Re-Mastered

Type: theory
Authors: Chauncey Wilson (editor)
Publishers: Morgan Kaufman
ISBN: 0123751144
Details: 396 pages, paperback

When you are new to the business and need a hands-on tour through the UX process.

In the last few years loads of real specialized UX books have been released. All of them contain hundreds of pages focusing on one specific subject, ranging from sketching to creating personas. For most designers these books contain too much information. For them ‘User Experience Re-mastered’ might be a great alternative. This book gives an overview of the design process, including practical examples. But it doesn’t do this by rewriting what has already been said in other books; it is a collection of chapters from existing books. I really like this approach, because there is already so much great stuff around… why do it again?

The content of the book is great for students and people who are new to the field, but there isn’t much new under the sun. One disadvantage of re-using chapters from exisiting books is that some examples and images do seem to be a bit old. There are even some pictures that are bad quality, which is a shame. But don’t let this scare you away, there are still some really interesting chapters such as ‘User Needs Analysis’, ‘Persona Conception and Gestation’ and Bill Buxton’s ‘Sketching: A Key to Good Design’.

Innovators: Shaping Our Creative Future

Type: inspiration
Authors: multiple
Publishers: BIS Publishers
ISBN: 978-94-9022-801-9
Details: 408 pages, hard cover

Be inspired by the innovators that are shaping our future.

There were high expectations when we received a copy of this book; it isn’t every day that a book tries to give an overview of the innovators of our creative future. Did it succeed? The fact that multiple friends already ordered their own copy might give an answer to that.

The idea behind the book was to let “international experts from twelve fields of creative practice, from fine art and photography to graphic design, architecture and ecology [...] each select five people who are making significant contributions to the way we experience life and visual culture.” This resulted in a beautiful book with 60 innovators and their work. Each innovator is introduced by a short text with a lot of graphic. The book screams to be looked.

While paging through this book you can enjoy many brilliant ideas. It is a nice way to get energy for your own projects. I personally liked the broadness of the fields, simply because the most unexpected fields seem to inspire me. My personal favorite innovators in the book were web artist Yogo Nakamura, rock band Radiohead and designer Viktor & Rolf. What are yours?

Layout Essentials: 100 Design Principles For Using Grids

Type: practical
Authors: Beth Tondreau
Publishers: BIS Publishers
ISBN: 978-90-6369-211-7
Details: 208 pages, hard cover

Learn to follow the rules and you’ll be able to gain more creative freedom.

As designers we are always struggling to create unique but perfect designs. It takes some time for us to acknowledge that behind each brilliant design isn’t just our bright mind, but also a world of existing rules. Among these rules the one about applying good grids must be one of the most important ones. Almost all good design around you uses a specific grid. Understanding the power of grids can help you become a much better designer, and that’s exactly where this book tries to come in. At it’s core the book tries to focus on graphic designers, but I believe that also interaction designers could benefit greatly from this knowledge. When we understand the power of grids we can understand why certain sources of information (websites, UI, …) are more succesfull than others.

At the start of the book she shortly introduces the vocabulary for grids (columns, modules, margins, modular, multicolumn, ..), but right after that she jumps into the 100 examples. The book itself is beautifully made and the full color plates are really inspiring. Each example shows you the helpfulness of grids without having to lose graphical power and freedom. I really liked this practical approach of showing examples with a bit of theory., but I can imagine that a lot of people like to have more background information before they start applying the grids. So if you love theory: don’t buy this book. If you love the more practical approach: get it.

PS: if you want to directly start using grids for websites, go to the 960 Grid System site.

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Our entire lives we’re busy protecting everything around us, ranging from our children’s health to the car we drive. It’s not always made easy for us to do this. So, being a product designer, I’ve come up with some possible solutions that could make our protecting lives easier.

Shacklie

Among all the belongings I’ve ever had, the item I’ve lost most must be the umbrella (except for love). So I decided to start protecting it. I thought the half circle of the handle could extend more to make a complete circle, which works as a handcuff like lock…

Smoke Detecting Maternity Badge

In Japan, there is a “maternity mark” used for asking for courtesy towards pregnant women in public places. It’s widely used in badges, cell-phone straps, posters, signs, etc., but unfortunately there are still some people who are ignorant about it. I’ve even seen a few men who started smoking even when there was a pregnant woman around.

This white badge actually does exist, but it’s for the people around her to know that the lady with it is pregnant. So how about using it also for herself? It detects smoke and tells you glowing blue with a sign “Don’t smoke!” and the annoyed faces. It would be good for the expectant mother so that she can quickly notice smoke and get out of there.

Crooked closure

Everybody must have once opened a snack bag in such a way that it won’t close via the bag closure anymore. Yeah, you can eat up the snack and there’s nothing to worry about. But when you want to leave some, what do you do with it?

So how about a crooked closure so that you can seal it?

Quite often I think about what it would be like if I had any kind of disability. A long time ago, I saw a drama in which a poor girl loses her ability to hear and speak. In the last episode, she also becomes vision-impaired. Even now the memory sometimes reminds me of the challenging situation she was put into. It triggered me enough to try and come up with some helpful tools or gadgets.

I’m not sure if these ideas could be realized.. But if it’s possible I’m sure it will be a big help for the physically challenged.

Gadget 1: The sign language interpreter

Meet the sign language interpreter. A small pendant-like gadget that enables a vocally-challenged person to speak. The camera captures the motion image of the speaker’s hand gesture. It translates it into an oral language and gives out the translated words.

You can pre-choose what kind of voice you’d like it to speak in.

It’s easy to turn it on: just click the bottom part when you want to use the interpreter. It will open up the speaker. The wider the speaker opens, the louder the volume. This volume control will probably be used very often, since you don’t want it to speak loud in a quiet space. So I thought it must be as easy and intuitive as possible. To turn it off, click it back and shut.

(The camera is capturing the image)

Gadget 2: Live cartoonversation interpreter

This gadget is to help the hearing-impaired follow conversations.

Speech balloons in comic books show very well how the characters speak. So if there was a way to see instantly visualized images of how people speak, wouldn’t it be nice for the hearing-impaired? It means they can SEE our voices.

With the particular characteristics of the speech balloons you see in comic books, you can see and feel how the words are being spoken.