UXmatters has published 61 articles on the topic Sample Chapters.
This is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of Jessica Enders’s new book Designing UX: Forms. 2016 SitePoint.
Paper forms are static. Immobile, unresponsive, fixed. Forms come alive when they’re on the Web: questions can appear or hide, errors can be flagged and corrected, and the experience can be tailored to users and their needs.
In this chapter, we’ll see how to best design all these user interactions and more. Because we want the total user experience to feel smooth and painless—like gliding down a river—we’ll call this aspect of form design flow. Read More
An excerpt from Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices. ©2006 New Riders.
Other design disciplines use raw materials. Communication designers use basic visual elements such as the line. Industrial designers work with simple 3D shapes such as the cube, the sphere, and the cylinder. For interaction designers, who create products and services that can be digital (software) or analog (a karaoke machine) or both (a mobile phone), the design elements are more conceptual. And yet they offer a powerful set of components for interaction designers to bring to bear on their projects.
In much the same way that inert gases don’t mingle with other gases, objects that don’t move don’t interact. An interaction is some sort of communication, and communication is about movement: our vocal cords vibrating as we speak, our hands and arms writing or typing as we send email or instant messages, sound and data moving between two entities. Read More
This is an sample chapter from Josh Clark’s book Designing for Touch. 2015, A Book Apart.
Hands are wonderfully expressive. We talk with our hands all the time: they ask questions, show intent, command attention, reveal emotion. A backhanded wave dismisses an idea; a jab of the finger accuses; a thumbs-up enthuses. If hands are excellent at communicating with people, they’re even more effective at communicating with objects. From the delicate operation of tying a shoelace to the blunt-force strength of opening a pickle jar, our hands and fingers constantly improvise in grip, pressure, position, and sensitivity.
How can we bring similar expression to manipulating digital information? Touchscreens put data literally in the user’s hands, and it’s the designer’s job to enable and interpret that interaction. Unfortunately, while our hands have a robust vocabulary for speaking to people and objects, we’re still in the grammar-school stages of a gestural language for touchscreens. A richer lexicon lies ahead, but it will take time for a more sophisticated range of touchscreen gestures to become common knowledge. Read More