Are digital interfaces controlling more than we realise? Can designers take responsibility, and should they? From domestic appliances like Siri and Amazon Echo, to large scale Facebook manipulation and Google search prediction, digital interfaces are ubiquitous in everyday life and their influences affect how people live, feel and behave. As they grow in complexity and increase integration into our lives we need to address the social, ethical, political and aesthetic responsibilities of those designing and creating the computer systems all around us. Through discussion with cutting-edge designers and thinkers and with international examples, the authors explain how we need an expanded aesthetic, critical and ethical awareness on the part of designers willing to act with sensitivity and understanding towards the people they design for and with. This critical take on the process and implications of interface design looks beyond the mechanics of making, and into the techno-political realm of deliberate and unintended consequences.

Through hundreds of photographs, this dynamic guide demonstrates how to expertly apply design principles in a variety of devices, desktops, web pages, mobile and other touchscreen devices.

This text offers advice on creating user-friendly interface designs - whether they're delivered on the Web, a CD, or a 'smart' device like a cell phone. It presents solutions to common UI design problems as a collection of patterns - each containing concrete examples, recommendations, and warnings.

Designing User Interfaces for an Aging Population: Towards Universal Design presents age-friendly design guidelines that are well-established, agreed-upon, research-based, actionable, and applicable across a variety of modern technology platforms. The book offers guidance for product engineers, designers, or students who want to produce technological products and online services that can be easily and successfully used by older adults and other populations. It presents typical age-related characteristics, addressing vision and visual design, hand-eye coordination and ergonomics, hearing and sound, speech and comprehension, navigation, focus, cognition, attention, learning, memory, content and writing, attitude and affect, and general accessibility. The authors explore characteristics of aging via realistic personas which demonstrate the impact of design decisions on actual users over age 55. - Presents the characteristics of older adults that can hinder use of technology - Provides guidelines for designing technology that can be used by older adults and younger people - Review real-world examples of designs that implement the guidelines and the designs that violate them

Our love affair with the digital interface is out of control. We’ve embraced it in the boardroom, the bedroom, and the bathroom. Screens have taken over our lives. Most people spend over eight hours a day staring at a screen, and some “technological innovators” are hoping to grab even more of your eyeball time. You have screens in your pocket, in your car, on your appliances, and maybe even on your face. Average smartphone users check their phones 150 times a day, responding to the addictive buzz of Facebook or emails or Twitter. Are you sick? There’s an app for that! Need to pray? There’s an app for that! Dead? Well, there’s an app for that, too! And most apps are intentionally addictive distractions that end up taking our attention away from things like family, friends, sleep, and oncoming traffic. There’s a better way. In this book, innovator Golden Krishna challenges our world of nagging, screen-based bondage, and shows how we can build a technologically advanced world without digital interfaces. In his insightful, raw, and often hilarious criticism, Golden reveals fascinating ways to think beyond screens using three principles that lead to more meaningful innovation. Whether you’re working in technology, or just wary of a gadget-filled future, you’ll be enlighted and entertained while discovering that the best interface is no interface.

With hundreds of thousands of mobile applications available today, your app has to capture users immediately. This book provides practical techniques to help you catch—and keep—their attention. You’ll learn core principles for designing effective user interfaces, along with a set of common patterns for interaction design on all types of mobile devices. Mobile design specialists Steven Hoober and Eric Berkman have collected and researched 76 best practices for everything from composing pages and displaying information to the use of screens, lights, and sensors. Each pattern includes a discussion of the design problem and solution, along with variations, interaction and presentation details, and antipatterns. Compose pages so that information is easy to locate and manipulate Provide labels and visual cues appropriate for your app’s users Use information control widgets to help users quickly access details Take advantage of gestures and other sensors Apply specialized methods to prevent errors and the loss of user-entered data Enable users to easily make selections, enter text, and manipulate controls Use screens, lights, haptics, and sounds to communicate your message and increase user satisfaction "Designing Mobile Interfaces is another stellar addition to O’Reilly’s essential interface books. Every mobile designer will want to have this thorough book on their shelf for reference." —Dan Saffer, Author of Designing Gestural Interfaces

Effective interface animation deftly combines form and function to improve feedback, aid in orientation, direct attention, show causality, and express your brand’s personality. Designing Interface Animation shows you how to create web animation that balances purpose and style while blending seamlessly into the user’s experience. This book is a crash course in motion design theory and practice for web designers, UX professionals, and front-end developers alike.

Whether you’re designing consumer electronics, medical devices, enterprise Web apps, or new ways to check out at the supermarket, today’s digitally-enabled products and services provide both great opportunities to deliver compelling user experiences and great risks of driving your customers crazy with complicated, confusing technology. Designing successful products and services in the digital age requires a multi-disciplinary team with expertise in interaction design, visual design, industrial design, and other disciplines. It also takes the ability to come up with the big ideas that make a desirable product or service, as well as the skill and perseverance to execute on the thousand small ideas that get your design into the hands of users. It requires expertise in project management, user research, and consensus-building. This comprehensive, full-color volume addresses all of these and more with detailed how-to information, real-life examples, and exercises. Topics include assembling a design team, planning and conducting user research, analyzing your data and turning it into personas, using scenarios to drive requirements definition and design, collaborating in design meetings, evaluating and iterating your design, and documenting finished design in a way that works for engineers and stakeholders alike.

Presents a set of design principles, patterns, and best practices that can be used to create user interfaces for new social websites or to improve existing social sites, along with advice for common challenges faced when designing social interfaces.

Most programmers' fear of user interface (UI) programming comes from their fear of doing UI design. They think that UI design is like graphic design—the mysterious process by which creative, latte-drinking, all-black-wearing people produce cool-looking, artistic pieces. Most programmers see themselves as analytic, logical thinkers instead—strong at reasoning, weak on artistic judgment, and incapable of doing UI design. In this brilliantly readable book, author Joel Spolsky proposes simple, logical rules that can be applied without any artistic talent to improve any user interface, from traditional GUI applications to websites to consumer electronics. Spolsky's primary axiom, the importance of bringing the program model in line with the user model, is both rational and simple. In a fun and entertaining way, Spolky makes user interface design easy for programmers to grasp. After reading User Interface Design for Programmers, you'll know how to design interfaces with the user in mind. You'll learn the important principles that underlie all good UI design, and you'll learn how to perform usability testing that works.