Alan Cooper;Robert Reimann;David Cronin;Chris Noessel
URL
Status
Genre
Book Name
About Face
Modified
Last updated December 26, 2023
Summary
About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin and Chris Noessel is a comprehensive introduction to interaction design. It explores design strategies that create captivating and useful digital experiences, while ensuring they are comfortably human-oriented.
Key Learnings:
• Understand the history and need for interaction design
• Gain insights on how user experience is created
• Define user goals for an effective interface
• Structure user actions to create a logical flow
• Use design patterns to build flawless interfaces
• Manage usability testing and feedback from users
Why UX Designers Should Read This Book: Through the book’s detailed approach, UX designers gain comprehensive information on how to get from a product’s conception to design, and ultimately to its execution.
Other Interesting Reads: Design for How People Learn by Julie Dirksen, Design for Real Life by Sara Wachter-Boettcher and Eric Meyer and Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.
✏️ Highlights
On the surface, this premise seems obvious: Make people happy, and your products will be a success. Why, then, are so many digital products so difficult and unpleasant to use?
Design, according to industrial designer Victor Papanek, is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order.
Our software-enabled products also fail to act with a basic level of decency. They forget information we tell them and don’t do a very good job of anticipating our needs.
Even the iPhone—generally the baseline for good user experience on a digital device—doesn’t anticipate that someone might not want to be pestered with a random phone call when he is in the middle of a business meeting that is sitting right there in the iPhone’s own calendar.
Why can’t it quietly put a call that isn’t from a family member into voicemail?
If a 10-year-old boy behaved like some software apps or devices, he’d be sent to his room without supper. These products forget to shut the refrigerator door, leave their shoes in the middle of the floor, and can’t remember what you told them only five minutes earlier. For example, if you save a Microsoft Word document, print it, and then try to close it, the application again asks you if you want to save it! Evidently the act of printing caused the application to think the document had changed, even though it did not. Sorry, Mom, I didn’t hear you.
Dropbox, for example, sandwiches Delete between Download and Rename on its context menus, practically inviting people to lose the work they’ve uploaded to the cloud for safekeeping.
every time we go out into the field to watch real people doing their jobs with the assistance of technology, we are struck by how much work they are forced to do simply to manage the proper operation of software. This work can be anything from manually copying (or, worse, retyping) values from one window into another, to attempting (often futilely) to paste data between applications that otherwise don’t speak to each other, to the ubiquitous clicking and pushing and pulling of windows and widgets around the screen to access hidden functionality that people use every day to do their job.
Digital products require humans to do the heavy lifting
On the surface, this premise seems obvious: Make people happy, and your products will be a success. Why, then, are so many digital products so difficult and unpleasant to use?
Design, according to industrial designer Victor Papanek, is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order.
Our software-enabled products also fail to act with a basic level of decency. They forget information we tell them and don’t do a very good job of anticipating our needs.
Even the iPhone—generally the baseline for good user experience on a digital device—doesn’t anticipate that someone might not want to be pestered with a random phone call when he is in the middle of a business meeting that is sitting right there in the iPhone’s own calendar.
Why can’t it quietly put a call that isn’t from a family member into voicemail?
If a 10-year-old boy behaved like some software apps or devices, he’d be sent to his room without supper. These products forget to shut the refrigerator door, leave their shoes in the middle of the floor, and can’t remember what you told them only five minutes earlier. For example, if you save a Microsoft Word document, print it, and then try to close it, the application again asks you if you want to save it! Evidently the act of printing caused the application to think the document had changed, even though it did not. Sorry, Mom, I didn’t hear you.
Dropbox, for example, sandwiches Delete between Download and Rename on its context menus, practically inviting people to lose the work they’ve uploaded to the cloud for safekeeping.
every time we go out into the field to watch real people doing their jobs with the assistance of technology, we are struck by how much work they are forced to do simply to manage the proper operation of software. This work can be anything from manually copying (or, worse, retyping) values from one window into another, to attempting (often futilely) to paste data between applications that otherwise don’t speak to each other, to the ubiquitous clicking and pushing and pulling of windows and widgets around the screen to access hidden functionality that people use every day to do their job.
Digital products require humans to do the heavy lifting
On the surface, this premise seems obvious: Make people happy, and your products will be a success. Why, then, are so many digital products so difficult and unpleasant to use?
Design, according to industrial designer Victor Papanek, is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order.
Our software-enabled products also fail to act with a basic level of decency. They forget information we tell them and don’t do a very good job of anticipating our needs.
Even the iPhone—generally the baseline for good user experience on a digital device—doesn’t anticipate that someone might not want to be pestered with a random phone call when he is in the middle of a business meeting that is sitting right there in the iPhone’s own calendar.
Why can’t it quietly put a call that isn’t from a family member into voicemail?
If a 10-year-old boy behaved like some software apps or devices, he’d be sent to his room without supper. These products forget to shut the refrigerator door, leave their shoes in the middle of the floor, and can’t remember what you told them only five minutes earlier. For example, if you save a Microsoft Word document, print it, and then try to close it, the application again asks you if you want to save it! Evidently the act of printing caused the application to think the document had changed, even though it did not. Sorry, Mom, I didn’t hear you.
Dropbox, for example, sandwiches Delete between Download and Rename on its context menus, practically inviting people to lose the work they’ve uploaded to the cloud for safekeeping.
every time we go out into the field to watch real people doing their jobs with the assistance of technology, we are struck by how much work they are forced to do simply to manage the proper operation of software. This work can be anything from manually copying (or, worse, retyping) values from one window into another, to attempting (often futilely) to paste data between applications that otherwise don’t speak to each other, to the ubiquitous clicking and pushing and pulling of windows and widgets around the screen to access hidden functionality that people use every day to do their job.
Digital products require humans to do the heavy lifting
