“For years now, I’ve been running around preaching to anyone who’ll listen that UX is something that everybody (not just UX people) needs to be doing. Dave has done an excellent job of explaining what developers need to know about UX, in a complete but compact, easy-to-absorb, and implementable form. Developers, come and get it!” —Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability Master User Experience and Interaction Design from the Developer’s Perspective For modern developers, UX expertise is indispensable: Without outstanding user experience, your software will fail. Now, David Platt has written the first and only comprehensive developer’s guide to achieving a world-class user experience. Quality user experience isn’t hard, but it does require developers to think in new ways. The Joy of UX shows you how, with plenty of concrete examples. Firmly grounded in reality, this guide will help you optimize usability and engagement while also coping with difficult technical, schedule, and budget constraints. Platt’s technology-agnostic approach illuminates all the principles, techniques, and best practices you need to build great user experiences for the web, mobile devices, and desktop environments. He covers the entire process, from user personas and stories through wireframes, layouts, and execution. He also addresses key issues—such as telemetry and security—that many other UX guides ignore. You’ll find all the resources and artifacts you need: complete case studies, sample design documents, testing plans, and more. This guide shows you how to Recognize and avoid pitfalls that lead to poor user experiences Learn the crucial difference between design and mere decoration Put yourself in your users’ shoes—understand what they want (and where, when, and why) Quickly sketch and prototype user interfaces for easy refinement Test your sketches on real users or appropriate surrogates Integrate telemetry to capture the best possible usage information Use analytics to accurately interpret the data you’ve captured Solve unique experience problems presented by mobile environments Secure your app without compromising usability any more than necessary “Polish” your UX to eliminate user effort everywhere you can Register your product at informit.com/register for convenient access to downloads, updates, and corrections as they become available.

"I've just finished reading the best computer book [ Why Software Sucks...] since I last re-read one of mine and I wanted to pass along the good word. . . . Put this one on your must-have list if you have software, love software, hate programmers, or even ARE a programmer, because Mr. Platt (who teaches programming) has set out to puncture the bloated egos of all those who think that just because they can write a program, they can make it easy to use. . . . This book is funny, but it is also an important wake-up call for software companies that want to reduce the size of their customer support bills. If you were ever stuck for an answer to the question, 'Why do good programmers make such awful software?' this book holds the answer." -- John McCormick, Locksmith columnist, TechRepublic.com "I must say first, I don't get many computing manuscripts that make me laugh out loud. Between the laughs, Dave Platt delivers some very interesting insight and perspective, all in a lucid and engaging style. I don't get much of that either!" -- Henry Leitner, assistant dean for information technology and senior lecturer on computer science, Harvard University "A riotous book for all of us downtrodden computer users, written in language that we understand." -- Stacy Baratelli, author's barber "David's unique take on the problems that bedevil software creation made me think about the process in new ways. If you care about the quality of the software you create or use, read this book." -- Dave Chappell, principal, Chappell & Associates "I began to read it in my office but stopped before I reached the bottom of the first page. I couldn't keep a grin off my face! I'll enjoy it after I go back home and find a safe place to read." -- Tsukasa Makino, IT manager "David explains, in terms that my mother-in-law can understand, why the software we use today can be so frustrating, even dangerous at times, and gives us some real ideas on what we can do about it." -- Jim Brosseau, Clarrus Consulting Group, Inc. A Book for Anyone Who Uses a Computer Today...and Just Wants to Scream! Today's software sucks. There's no other good way to say it. It's unsafe, allowing criminal programs to creep through the Internet wires into our very bedrooms. It's unreliable, crashing when we need it most, wiping out hours or days of work with no way to get it back. And it's hard to use, requiring large amounts of head-banging to figure out the simplest operations. It's no secret that software sucks. You know that from personal experience, whether you use computers for work or personal tasks. In this book, programming insider David Platt explains why that's the case and, more importantly, why it doesn't have to be that way. And he explains it in plain, jargon-free English that's a joy to read, using real-world examples with which you're already familiar. In the end, he suggests what you, as a typical user, without a technical background, can do about this sad state of our software--how you, as an informed consumer, don't have to take the abuse that bad software dishes out. As you might expect from the book's title, Dave's expose is laced with humor--sometimes outrageous, but always dead on. You'll laugh out loud as you recall incidents with your own software that made you cry. You'll slap your thigh with the same hand that so often pounded your computer desk and wished it was a bad programmer's face. But Dave hasn't written this book just for laughs. He's written it to give long-overdue voice to your own discovery--that software does, indeed, suck, but it shouldn't.

The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience aims to help readers learn how to create and refine interaction designs that ensure a quality user experience (UX). The book seeks to expand the concept of traditional usability to a broader notion of user experience; to provide a hands-on, practical guide to best practices and established principles in a UX lifecycle; and to describe a pragmatic process for managing the overall development effort. The book provides an iterative and evaluation-centered UX lifecycle template, called the Wheel, for interaction design. Key concepts discussed include contextual inquiry and analysis; extracting interaction design requirements; constructing design-informing models; design production; UX goals, metrics, and targets; prototyping; UX evaluation; the interaction cycle and the user action framework; and UX design guidelines. This book will be useful to anyone interested in learning more about creating interaction designs to ensure a quality user experience. These include interaction designers, graphic designers, usability analysts, software engineers, programmers, systems analysts, software quality-assurance specialists, human factors engineers, cognitive psychologists, cosmic psychics, trainers, technical writers, documentation specialists, marketing personnel, and project managers. - A very broad approach to user experience through its components—usability, usefulness, and emotional impact with special attention to lightweight methods such as rapid UX evaluation techniques and an agile UX development process - Universal applicability of processes, principles, and guidelines—not just for GUIs and the Web, but for all kinds of interaction and devices: embodied interaction, mobile devices, ATMs, refrigerators, and elevator controls, and even highway signage - Extensive design guidelines applied in the context of the various kinds of affordances necessary to support all aspects of interaction - Real-world stories and contributions from accomplished UX practitioners - A practical guide to best practices and established principles in UX - A lifecycle template that can be instantiated and tailored to a given project, for a given type of system development, on a given budget

Five years and more than 100,000 copies after it was first published, it's hard to imagine anyone working in Web design who hasn't read Steve Krug's "instant classic" on Web usability, but people are still discovering it every day. In this second edition, Steve adds three new chapters in the same style as the original: wry and entertaining, yet loaded with insights and practical advice for novice and veteran alike. Don't be surprised if it completely changes the way you think about Web design. Three New Chapters! Usability as common courtesy -- Why people really leave Web sites Web Accessibility, CSS, and you -- Making sites usable and accessible Help! My boss wants me to ______. -- Surviving executive design whims "I thought usability was the enemy of design until I read the first edition of this book. Don't Make Me Think! showed me how to put myself in the position of the person who uses my site. After reading it over a couple of hours and putting its ideas to work for the past five years, I can say it has done more to improve my abilities as a Web designer than any other book. In this second edition, Steve Krug adds essential ammunition for those whose bosses, clients, stakeholders, and marketing managers insist on doing the wrong thing. If you design, write, program, own, or manage Web sites, you must read this book." -- Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing with Web Standards

This book is two things. It’s an eye-opener to the fact that we don’t have to do a million things to be productive (or successful). And it’s a coach that helps us trim the fat, get real with our purpose, and start living more intentionally-Goop Dalton helps readers by teaching us to focus on the most important things and create our own operating systems that are exclusive to our lives as individuals. By doing this, we can simplify and make life even better- San Francisco Book Review Dalton’s ground-up approach to productivity teaches readers to identify their real priorities and, in doing so, cut their massive to-do lists down to size by learning to say no to the tasks that pull them away from their North Star-Grateful Overwhelmed. Do you wake up in the morning already feeling behind? Does the pressure of keeping it all together make you feel anxious and irritable? Tanya Dalton, CEO and productivity expert, offers you a liberating shift in perspective: feeling overwhelmed isn't the result of having too much to do -- it's from not knowing where to start. Doing less might seem counterintuitive, but doing less is more productive, because you’re concentrating on the work you actually want to be doing. Through this book, you can learn how to: Identify what is important to you and clarify your priorities. Develop ways to streamline your specific workflow. Discover your purpose. Named Top 10 Business Book of the Year by Fortune magazine, The Joy of Missing Out is chock-full of resources and printables. This is a legitimate action plan for change. Once you reject the pressure to do more, something amazing happens: you discover you can finally live a guilt-free, abundant life.

From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us. In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us. The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.

Why attractive things work better and other crucial insights into human-centered design Emotions are inseparable from how we humans think, choose, and act. In Emotional Design, cognitive scientist Don Norman shows how the principles of human psychology apply to the invention and design of new technologies and products. In The Design of Everyday Things, Norman made the definitive case for human-centered design, showing that good design demanded that the user's must take precedence over a designer's aesthetic if anything, from light switches to airplanes, was going to work as the user needed. In this book, he takes his thinking several steps farther, showing that successful design must incorporate not just what users need, but must address our minds by attending to our visceral reactions, to our behavioral choices, and to the stories we want the things in our lives to tell others about ourselves. Good human-centered design isn't just about making effective tools that are straightforward to use; it's about making affective tools that mesh well with our emotions and help us express our identities and support our social lives. From roller coasters to robots, sports cars to smart phones, attractive things work better. Whether designer or consumer, user or inventor, this book is the definitive guide to making Norman's insights work for you.

In a complex world, products that are easy to use win favor with consumers. This is the first book on the topic of simplicity aimed specifically at interaction designers. It shows how to drill down and simplify user experiences when designing digital tools and applications. It begins by explaining why simplicity is attractive, explores the laws of simplicity, and presents proven strategies for achieving simplicity. Remove, hide, organize and displace become guidelines for designers, who learn simplicity by seeing before and after examples and case studies where the results speak for themselves.

User experience design is the discipline of creating a useful and usable Web site or application that’s easily navigated and meets the needs of the site owner and its users. There’s a lot more to successful UX design than knowing the latest Web technologies or design trends: It takes diplomacy, management skills, and business savvy. That’s where the updated edition of this important book comes in. With new information on design principles, mobile and gestural interactions, content strategy, remote research tools and more, you’ll learn to: Recognize the various roles in UX design, identify stakeholders, and enlist their support Obtain consensus from your team on project objectives Understand approaches such as Waterfall, Agile, and Lean UX Define the scope of your project and avoid mission creep Conduct user research in person or remotely, and document your findings Understand and communicate user behavior with personas Design and prototype your application or site Plan for development, product rollout, and ongoing quality assurance

The Joy of JavaScript introduces techniques that turn JavaScript programmers into JavaScript pros. Summary Whether building interactive browser-based applications or creating server-side applications in Node, JavaScript is the most widely used language for web programming. With new features, language improvements, paradigms, and potential use cases appearing regularly, there’s never been a more exciting time to be a JavaScript developer. In The Joy of JavaScript, author and JavaScript expert Luis Atencio teaches you key design concepts that lead to clean, lean, modular, and easy-to-maintain code. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the technology JavaScript is at the heart of web applications on the browser side and, via the popular Node.js runtime, it often powers the server side too. Simply put, the web runs on JavaScript. About the book The Joy of JavaScript introduces techniques that turn JavaScript programmers into JavaScript pros. You’ll work with cutting edge APIs, language features, and coding styles to tackle tricky problems in an elegant manner. Along the way, you’ll practice good object design, drive business logic with functional thinking, and untangle complex data flows. What's inside JavaScript’s objects and module system Working with higher order functions Identifying and creating composable software Preparing for upcoming JavaScript features About the reader Written for experienced and passionate JavaScript developers. About the author Luis Atencio is a software engineer for Citrix Systems, author of Manning’s Functional Programming in JavaScript, and co-author of Manning’s RxJS in Action. Table of Contents 1 JavaScript reloaded PART 1 - OBJECTS 2 Inheritance-based object modeling 3 Linked, compositional object models PART 2 - FUNCTIONS 4 Writing composable, pure code 5 Higher-kinded composition PART 3 - CODE 6 ECMAScript Modules 7 Hooked on metaprogramming PART 4 - DATA 8 Linear async flows 9 Stream programming