One thing to notice is that this book is about processes rather than how to actually design things. So if your looking for a design book this is not it. If on the other hand you’re looking for a book about the process of coming up with the design for web sites and web applications this is definitely a great book. It doesn’t go into great detail about each specific part of the process but provides a good overview and includes many great pointers to other resources.

The book is really hands on. It provides lots of descriptions of how to actually do things. Like signing a contract with the customer or choosing the right user research method.

The structure of the book

The first few chapters of the book is about the different roles of a UX designer in a project team. It’s also about how to create proposals and how to plan the project.

1. The Tao of UXD
2. The Project Ecosystem
3. Proposals for Consultants and Freelancers

Then there’s a few chapters about how to gather initial business requirements and how to do initial user research. There’s also a chapter about how Search Engine Optimization fits in the UX process.

4. Project Objectives and Approach
5. Business Requirements
6. User Research
7. Personas
8. User Experience Design and Search Engine Optimization

The last chapters of the book is about how to transition from defining to designing. They describe different techniques and approaches of coming up with the structure and design of the site. Examples of techniques are Site Maps, Task Flows, Wireframes and Prototypes. There’s also a chapter on how to perform usability tests with users and lastely there’s a chapter on how to transition from design to the actual development of the site.

9. Transition: From Defining to Designing
10. Site Maps and Task Flows
11. Wireframes and Annotations
12. Prototyping
13. Design Testing with Users
14. Transition: From Design to Development and Beyond

Bonus material

The book comes with a bonus, online-only chapter called A brief Guide to Meetings (pdf). I suggest that you download that chapter and read it to get a sense of the style of the book. There’s also an online chapter from the book available at the Peachpit website. The chapter is called Project Objectives and Approach.

Apart from those there’s additional documents and templates available at the download area of the book site.

Final thoughts

The book is really well edited. I haven’t been able to find a single typo. I found it very enjoyable to read and even if a lot of the information was familiar to me there were still grains of gold to be found. The best chapter for me was Chapter 9 – Transition: From Defining to Designing. It described different approaches on how to come to consensus about what the primary goals of the projects are that I really haven’t thought of before.

If you want an overview of the UX design process and an introduction to different UX techniques and approaches, read this book! I highly recommend it!

Book information

Title: A Project Guide to UX Design
Author: Carolyn Chandler and Russ Unger
Publisher: New Riders Press; 1 edition (March 23, 2009)
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0-321-60737-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-321-60737-9

Further resources

The book site

As always Steve’s writing style is relaxed but still to the point. He’s very humorous and there are a lot of things in the book that makes me smile. The book is nicely designed and is rich with illustrations that breaks up the text and make it more enjoyable to read. It’s not a long book. As he states himself, it’s short enough to read on a long flight. I think that’s a good thing.

I really enjoy Steve’s pragmatic approach to the subject. He manages to demystify the subject and make the case that anyone, well almost anyone, can perform usability tests and benefit greatly from it. Throughout the book he delivers maxims which contains the most important points. Two of my favorites are “A morning a month, that’s all we ask” and “Start earlier than you think makes sense”.

The book also contains lots of extra material, such as sample test scripts, a consent form and a video of him actually performing a usability test. You can watch the video yourself from the book’s companion site. I think that these add greatly to the value of the book since they provide you with concrete tools to get started.

Conclusion

If you’re interested in usability testing, already do them or plan to start doing them, this is definitely a book for you. It does not have all the answers but will provide you with all the information you need to get started. If you’ve conducted usability test before I’m sure that you will still find lots of useful information.

All in all this is a great book and I highly recommend it! If you haven’t read his first book, Don’t Make Me Think already, I highly recommend that you read it too.

Book information

Title: Rocket Surgery Made Easy
Author: Steve Krug
Publisher: New Riders Press; 1 edition (December 18, 2009)
Pages: 168
ISBN: 0-321-65729-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-321-65729-9

Further resources

The book site

I’ve truly enjoyed Dan’s two former books Web Standards Solutions and Bulletproof Web Design. It was in fact from these books that I first learned the concepts of graceful degradation and progressive enhancement. I also learned clever CSS styling techniques that I’ve been using ever since.

In this new book Dan introduces the concept of Progressive Enrichment. It’s an extension of Progressive Enhancement and in a nutshell it’s about being OK with that web designs will look slightly different in different web browsers. Furthermore it’s about not letting the smallest common denominator deciding which techniques to use but rather reward the more forward-thinking browsers with a slightly more polished look than the other ones (read Internet Explorer). What this means is that it’s OK to start using some CSS 3 properties like border-radius and RGBA right now even though they’re not yet widely adopted.

If you’re still unsure about whether web sites have to look exactly the same in all browser or not, pay a visit at www.dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com.

The book also contains some ideas on how to reuse CSS between projects. Sort of like building you own lightweight CSS framework like Blueprint CSS and YAML. Dan explains the value of a global reset and some basic CSS rules that’s usable in every project.

It’s a true joy to read Dans texts. The writing style is relaxed but still to the point. The examples are thoroughly explained but doesn’t feel verbose. There’s also a laid back humor in the texts that make them even more enjoyable. As you probably noticed that I’m a big fan of Dan’s writing and the truth is that I wish that I could write like that. He’s just awesome.

Guest writer

This book features guest writer Ethan Marcotte who’s been writing a chapter about “The Fluid Grid”. Ethan is a renowned Web designer/developer from Airbag Industries. This chapter describes how to work with fluid grid-based designs. It contains both some history of grid-based design in print as well as techniques to incorporate them in a web design.

Included DVD

Included in the book I bought was a DVD featuring Dan explaining 10 design guidelines. The DVD was pretty OK but didn’t feature anything the book didn’t include. I guess that it’s primarily aimed at people that are not web designers and need to be oriented about some core concepts. Despite that, Dan playing ukulele in the background makes it well worth the time

Conclusion

If you’re interested in starting to use CSS 3 in your designs I highly recommend this book. Not so much for that it’s chock full of exciting CSS 3 properties because it’s not, but rather because it introduces ways to start using them right now without breaking the designs in older browsers. Anyway you’re in for a great read.

Further reading

Read more about the book at it’s acompaning web site handcraftedcss.com. You can also read more from Dan Cederholm at his blog Simplebits.com.

Book information

Title: Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design
Authors: Dan Cederholm and Ethan Marcotte
Publisher:New Riders Press; 1 Pap/DVD edition (August 20, 2009)
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0321658531
ISBN-13: 978-0321658531

The authors

Designing Web Interfaces is written by Bill Scott and Theresa Neil. Bill Scott has a background at Yahoo! and is currently working at Netflix. This shows in the examples of design patterns since a lot of them is taken from these companies websites.

Theresa Neil is a User Experience consultant located in Austin, Texas. She has worked with Bill before at Sabre Airline Solutions to form their User Experience team.

Organization of the book

The book is organized around 6 design principles. For each principle a number of design patterns are explained. The principles are:

• Make it direct
• Keep it Lightweight
• Stay on the Page
• Provide an Invitation
• Use Transitions
• React immediately

At the Explore the book section at the books companion site there’s a short explanation of each principle as well as a presentation of the design patterns presented in each chapter. So if you want to know more about what the book is all about I suggest you look there.

At several places in the book the authors references to About Face 3 by Alan Cooper. I like that since I think that’s an indispensable book that every Interaction Designer should read.

My take

I think that this book serves both as an inspiration in finding the right design patterns for the projects I’m working on as well as a deeper understanding of the underlying core principles when choosing and designing interaction elements. It has certainly provided me with a deeper understanding of the ins and outs of drag and drop interactions which is thoroughly examined in the book.

The book is well written, contains lots of illustrations and generally provides really good examples. If you’re designing/building highly interactive web sites or is interested in learning more about web design patterns, I’m certain that you will benefit from reading this book. I highly recommend it!

Resources

The books companion site is located at www.designingwebinterfaces.com. There you’ll find more information about the book, as well as links to other resources about design patterns.

Title: Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions
Authors: Bill Scott and Theresa Neil
Publisher:O’Reilly Media, Inc.; 1 edition (January 30, 2009)
Pages: 332
ISBN: 0596516258
ISBN-13: 978-0596516253

The three layers of the form

The authors introduces the concept of the three layers of the form. The book is organized around these three layers, so each layer has it’s own part.

• The first layer is about the relationship between the organization behind the form and the user.
• The second layer is about conversation. That is how the form talks to the user with it’s questions, labels and instructions. It’s also about how to logically group different kinds of information.
• The third layer is about the appearance of the form. Here’s where the design of the form is discussed. It’s also here where Caroline Jarrett gets to talk about her favorite topic, whether to put a colon at the end of the labels or not. (she doesn’t think it’s important , read why)

I think that this way of organizing the book works very well. It supports the design process presented and gives you a good understanding of what to focus on.

My take

I found Forms that Work fun and easy to read. It’s filled with illustrations and real-life examples, which makes it easy to understand how to put the concepts into practice. What I love about this book is that it’s compact and succinct. The authors deliberately decided to keep the book under 200 pages which I think was a very wise decision. The nitpicks I have is that I found quite a few typos. I also sometimes felt that the illustrations didn’t quite had the quality that I’d expect from a book like this. That said, these are only minor complaints and ones that shouldn’t prevent you from reading this otherwise excellent book.

Conclusion

This book will give you tips and guidelines that gets you started right away creating better web forms. The authors back their advice up with years of designing and usability testing forms, so you can feel pretty confident that they deliver good advice. There’s no doubt that after reading this book you will be able to design better forms. I highly recommend it.

Title: Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability
Authors: Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann (November 17, 2008)
Pages: 199
ISBN: 1-558607-10-2
ISBN-13: 978-1558607101

The book is basically about how to design intelligent things. Some call it ambient computing others discrete computing, but it’s all about the pitfalls and principles when we try to add intelligence to our daily objects.

Much of the focus in the book is on how to develop intelligent cars. Maybe it’s because it’s a field where the work of developing intelligent machines has reached farthest. Don also discusses the design of intelligent dishwashers, kitchens, personal assistants and so on, but not in the same depth as the discussion about cars.

Rules of Interaction

Don establishes six rules of interaction.

1. Provide rich, complex, and natural signals
2. Be predictable
3. Provide a good conceptual model
4. Make the output understandable
5. Provide continual awareness without annoyance
6. Exploit natural mappings

These rules are discussed in detail in the book and can be used as rules of thumb when designing intelligent objects.

Machine-Human Interaction

In the end of the book there’s a really interesting chapter where Don turns the table around and have a dialog with the intelligent machines and how they think about interacting with people. They call this discipline Machine-Human Interaction (MHI). The machines find people really hard to understand and think they have all kinds of odd behaviours. They have have five rules for communication between machines and people.

1. Keep things simple
   Since people have difficulty with anything complicated and don’t like to listen. Keep things simple
2. Give people a conceptual model
   A conceptual model is fiction, but a useful one. Since people can’t understand complicated things they need conceptual models to make them think they undestand.
3. Give reasons
   People like to think they understand things, therefor give them pictures and diagrams that explains what’s happening. Just be sure that it fits the conceptual model, otherwise they get confused.
4. Make people think they are in control
   When people think they understand what’s happening they feel like they are in control. They like that.
5. Continually reassure
   Give continual feedback so that users feel reassured that everything is working. People are emotional and needs this kind of stuff. Be careful though, not to give to much feedback, then they can get annoyed.
6. Never label human behaviour as “error”
   People don’t like to do errors. Treat it as a misunderstanding.

The last rule was not added by the machines but by Don himself. .

I found this chapter both hilarious and brilliant. It’s really educational since it makes you see these topic from a whole other perspective. Very refreshing! Also notice how these rules map with the six rules of interactions, they are merely seen from the perspective of the machine.

Final verdict

Although this book isn’t as brilliant and mind opening as The Design of Everyday Things or Emotional Design, I still think that it’s well worth a read. It contains some grains of gold even if Don seems to repeat himself a little to much in this book. In the end of the book there’s also an excellent list of books if you want to dive even deeper into some of the subjects discussed in the book.

Apart from that the book is a joy to read. I really enjoy Don’s writing style. He truly is a master of both words and science.

Video seminars

If your interested in this book and the things discussed in it there’s a recording from Don Normans talk at last years From Business To Buttons Conference. It’s complete with video and slides and in it he touches upon a lot of the concepts discussed in the book. You’ll find it on businesstobuttons.tv.

I’ve also watched a recording on iTunesU from Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Seminars from winter 2007 with lots of materials from this book. I wrote about that in the article Great video seminars from Stanford on iTunes U. In that article you will find more information on this seminar and links to it.

Title: The Design of Future Things
Author: Donald A. Norman
Publisher: Basic Books (October 29, 2007)
Pages: 240 pages
ISBN: 0-465002-27-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-465-002-27-6

I’m surprised that even though the book covers so many areas it still manages to penetrate each topic pretty deep. Naturally not as deep as a book totally devoted to one of these topics, but still it manages to do more than merely scratch the surface.

Disposition

The book is organized in two parts. Part 1, Search Engine Marketing Optimization, is for you who wants to learn more about how to market your site and increase visibility and conversion rates. Part 2, Web Performance Optimization, is about how to improve page load times.

Part 1 – Search Engine Marketing Optimization

I’m not that interested in SEO so I found those chapters pretty boring. But the chapters about how to improve conversion rates was more interesting. This topic is closely related to usability and how to design the user interface to encourage people to take action, while at the same time remove any barriers that stand between the user and the end goal.

Part 2 – Web Performance Optimization

The second part of the book about optimizing web performance was really good. The chapters about how to optimize HTML and CSS contained several useful tips as well as references to different tools and resources. The chapter I’m particularly excited about is the one about how to optimize AJAX solutions. It presented me with new concepts and ideas that I found really useful.

Web Standards

Since I myself is an advocate for developing with web standards, I’m pleased to see that Andy also is doing it in his recommendations and techniques. This is a big improvement from the last book where he recommended techniques that meant not adhering to current web standards.

Final verdict

The broad scope of this book makes me want to recommend it for the not so specialized developer/marketer/designer that wants little bits of everything. But on the other hand I found the Web Performance Optimization part of the book to be good enough for any web developer who wants to learn how to increase performance of his site.

The entire book is filled with statistics, results from real life tests and references to other resources. While it’s always good to backup your point with data, I sometimes felt that it got a bit tedious. All that statistic, especially in the first part of the book, made the reading a bit hard. All in all I still think that the book is so full of useful practical tips that it’s well worth the effort of reading it.

Companion site

There’s a companion site at www.websiteoptimization.com with extra material and articles.

Website Optimization
Author: Andrew B King
Publisher: O’Reilly Media, Inc.; 1 edition (July 15, 2008)
ISBN: 0-596515-08-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-596-515-08-9

What is Spotify?

Spotify is a music player that allows you to play music from the Internet without any restrictions. Here’s how they describe it at spotify.com.

Spotify is a new way to enjoy music. Simply download and install, before you know it you’ll be singing along to the genre, artist or song of your choice. With Spotify you are never far away from the song you want.

There are no restrictions in terms of what you can listen to or when. Forget about the hassle of waiting for files to download and fill up your hard drive before you get round to organizing them. Spotify is instant, fun and simple.

Essentially it’s all about playing music and to share songs and musiclists with others.

The User Interface

At first glance it looks a lot like a slimmed down iTunes. It’s a simple and functional interface but still visually compelling. I find it very intuitive and easy to use. It simply enables me to what I want to do with minimum effort.

Synchronization

If you create a new playlist on one computer it pops up in other computers that runs your account. But you can only play music on one computer at a time. If you start playing at another computer the music stops at the first and a message is displayed.

Nice, unobtrusive and easy to understand!

Share music with others

One cool thing with it is that you can easily share music and playlists with others. This is something that I find very nice since it makes me discover new great music.

Speed

I’m astonished by the speed of the application. Even though it’s a Web based software it responses immediately, like if the songs were on my computer.

Price

Spotify is free to use, but then it plays a commercial every five song or so. To get rid of the commercials you can either pay 99 SEK per month (about 10 Euro) or buy a daypass for 9 SEK (about 1 euro).

Compared to iTunes

I can’t help but compare Spotify with iTunes. Even though iTunes is packed with a lot more features it’s much more intrusive and above all, slower than Spotify. Why is it that iTunes is so much slower playing and displaying music on my harddrive than Spotify, doing the same with stuff from the Internet?

This leads me to believe that the responsiveness of an application is one of the most important factors for how much we appreciate it.

Conclusion

I think the reason that I like Spotify so much is that it supports me so well in the things I want to do with music.

• I have instant access to the music I want to listen to
• I can easily find the music I want to listen to
• It’s fast
• I don’t have to worry about files or copyrights
• It let’s me explore music and helps me find new music that I might like.
• It let’s me share music with others.

I can’t see any reason that Spotify wouldn’t be a huge success. I think it’s one of the best software I have ever used and I highly recommend it.

Now I’m just waiting for a mobile version so that I can use it on the go as well.

Learn more at www.spotify.com.

Studies have shown that completion rates of forms can be increased by 10-40 percent by designing them using best practices. If the form is the check-out form on an e-commerce site you can easily see that this potentially can be a good investment.

Luke makes the observation that most forms suck. Therefor it should be every designers mission to make them suck less. Exactly how to do this is explained in great detail throughout the book.

The structure of the book

The book is divided into three sections, each penetrating a different aspect of web form design:

• Form Structure

  This section focus on why form desing matters and the basic principles of good form design.

• Form Elements

  The use of different form elements is thoroughly investigated in this section. The question of which element to use in different situations is discussed.

• Form Interactions

  This part is about the process of filling out forms, how to handle form validation, giving proper feedback and help the user fill out the form.

Each chapter ends with a list of best practices on that particular topic.

On several places in the book there are small articles called “Perspectives” that give a guest writers view on a particular topic. These a written by experienced professionals and authors in the industry.

The book is written in an easy to read style with lots of pictures showing examples and illustrating the points being made. This makes it easy to follow and easy to grasp the different concepts. All images and illustrations in the book can be found on Flickr.

User tests

Some of the recommendations in the book are backed up with user tests. By using eye tracking studies, interviews and evaluation of performance of different tasks different approaches have been tested to come up with a set of recommendations. One example of a test is where the best place to put buttons in a form are. Another is where it’s most effective to place the label to a form element.

You can read about some of the conclusions Luke comes up with in the article Web application form design and in Web Application Form Design Expanded on his personal web site, www.lukew.com.

Summary

I think it’s admirable that someone has actually made a book on such a narrow but still important topic as web form design. I don’t know of any other book, making this one a must-read if you’re serious about designing excellent web sites and/or web applications.

The book contains lots of good tips, insights and best practices on how to design effective web forms that work with, instead of against the user. And I myself have found that I’m already making good use of several of the proposed solutions in my work.

Title: Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks
Author: Luke Wroblewski
Publisher: Rosenfeld Media, 2008
ISBN: 1-933820-24-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-933820-24-8

Enhanced address bar

The address bar is much more intuitive than before. You can now filter the web sites you’ve visited or bookmarked by just typing relevant words. Like for example when I type the word “Web standards” I get these results:

This is a really great improvement which I instantly fell in love with. It makes the address bar a lot more useful and saves a lot of time finding the right link.

Bookmarks

By clicking at the star in the address bar, you easily bookmark the current page. By clicking the star again you can edit and organize the bookmark. You can also tag the bookmark, making it easier to find. When you, for example, type the tag in the address bar, the bookmark appears in the list.

The Library

The library is a collection of bookmarks and your browsing history. It let’s you organize and search for links. You can also store the result of your search in a Smart Bookmark Folder, which updates automatically as more links get added. This might be an useful feature if you have lots of bookmarks and have a hard time finding the right ones. Personally I think that I will use the smart address bar most of the time. It’s more easily accessed and a lot faster to use and will probably suffice in most cases.

New text zoom

The new text zoom is zooming the whole page rather than just the text, much like IE7 does. Personally I prefer the old way where only the text changes size. I don’t know why they choose to implement it this way, but in my mind I think it’s a mistake. I just don’t see the advantage of blurred and pixelated images and forcing the user to scroll sideways.

Update [2008-06-27]: I’ve now noticed that it’s possible to choose which zoom style you prefer. The default is zoom of the entire page, but if you choose “Zoom” in the “View” menu, you can check the option “Zoom Text Only” and revert back to the old Text Zoom mode. (See image)

Password manager

The password manager have been changed from a modal dialog to a non-modal bar that appears at the top of the page not blocking the new page to display. This might seem like a small change, but I think that it’s one that makes the browsing experience more fluid.

Integrated add-ons manager

It’s now possible to find new add-ons without having to go to a separate page. When I tried it, I didn’t find the add-ons I was looking for. So I ended up having to click the link: “See all results” which leads to the add-on page at Mozilla. This just forces me take unnecessary steps on my way to find the right add-ons. My impression is that this is a feature that will need some more tweaking before it becomes really useful.

Added support for standards

Firefox 3 also have improved CSS support, native support for microformats, Javascript 1.8 support and much more. Although exciting stuff, I have to look deeper into these before writing anything about it.

Summary

Overall Firefox 3 have some really good new features, especially when it comes to managing bookmarks and finding the right links. The features I described here is of course just a few of many. To see them all visit Firefox features.

When it comes to performance, my first impression is that it doesn’t feel any faster even though the Firefox team claim to have much better memory management and other improvements to speed up the browser. More use and tests will probably tell if it’s faster or not.

What is your first impressions of Firefox 3?

Related resources

• Download Firefox 3
• Firefox features
• Video showing new features in Firefox 3

Robert Hoekman Jr, the author of Designing the Obvious, has written yet another book on interaction design, Designing the Moment. This time he get’s down and dirty with the nitty gritty details of web- and interaction design. In this book he uses a variety of real-world examples to describe, in great detail, how and why to design all the small details of navigation, forms, video interfaces, tag clouds and more.

I had high expectations on this book since I really liked Designing the Obvious. And I have to say that it met my expectations. It’s fun to read and provides lots of interesting examples on great interaction design.

Where Designing the Obvious was on a higher level with a more theoretical approach to design, Designing the Moment is more a hands-on book. It’s about how to actually design all those interactions. In this book Robert dissects the different aspects that makes the different elements well designed.

A word of warning though. If you’re looking for a book that teaches you how to implement the designs, this book is not for you. This book provides proof of concepts but not how to actually code it.

Seven

In Designing the Obvious Robert presented seven principles for good interaction design. I don’t know if it’s just pure coincidence that this book is separated in seven parts, each focusing on a different aspect of design? Since seven, plus minus two, is known as the number of items a person can hold in his short term memory, I suspect that some serious thinking has been going on here. Never the less, here’s the seven parts:

Part 1: Getting Oriented

This part is about getting the user to quickly understand what the web application is all about and where to start. It’s about how to give a good first impression. This is done by providing examples of how to layout the pages and to give the application personality. It’s also about how to style links and tag clouds and how to structure menus.

Part 2: Learning

To communicate with the user and provide good instructions is a crucial part of a web application. This part of the book is about writing good copy and how to structure information to increase scannability. It also provides example of when it’s better to use video over text to tell the user how to do something.

Part 3: Searching

In this part of the book Robert gives example on how to improve searches by using auto-completes as a Poka-yoke device. He also gives good advices on how tho use pagination in a good fashion and how to make Advanced Search less intimidating.

Part 4: Diving In

In “Diving in”, the book talks about interaction details that the user encounters while using a web application. It provides ideas about how to design forms, wizards and video controls. It also has some interesting thought on how to design the sign in process.

Part 5: Participating

In this part Robert has some really interesting thoughts on how to design for social media. It’s about how to progressively building user profiles and about connecting with other people.

Part 6: Managing Information

To manage information is important, especially when there’s lots of it. This part of the book is about how to enable the user to find the right content and to interact with it in a proper manner.

Part 7: Moving On

Part 7 is about how to (and how not to) design the sign out process. It’s also about how to handle things if the user chooses to abandon your application.

My take

The major point that Robert is trying to make is that every little detail counts. Every part of the interaction is an opportunity to enhance or destroy the experience for the user. All of those small details add up to the total impression of the application. That’s the essence of Designing the Moment. To really try to make the best of all of those small moments.

All in all I think this book makes for a good read. It’s written in a easy-to-read language and is nicely designed with lots of color images illustrating the different examples. This book is about how to actually design the different interactions in explicit detail. So if you’re interested in some great examples on how to design great interaction and why to design it that way, this book is definitively is for you.

I highly recommend it!

Designing the Moment
Author: Robert Hoekman, Jr.
Publisher: New Riders 2008
ISBN-10: 0-321-53508-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-321-53508-5

For example if you want to delete songs from the mp3-player, something that you do quite often as you want to fill it with different music, you have to go through two (!) confirmation boxes.

It’s almost insulting! I mean first I try to delete the song, then I have to confirm the delete and then I have to confirm the confirm. It’s not like I’m trying to format my hard drive! This is just a way for the developers to cover their own behinds. These kinds of alerts that you frequently have to click to get something done, you soon start to ignore. You just don’t read them anymore, you just automatically click them to get on with what you are doing. So if you really deleting something by accident, you probably won’t realize it until it’s too late. Therefor a much better solution is an undo-function.

SonicStage is filled with alert boxes that pops-up every time you try to do something and it’s really annoying. There’s just no way to escape them.

Another annoying thing is that I had a hard time finding my MP3-player the first times. I had to search the application a long time before I found the right place. In the middle of the upper part of the application is a toolbar with three options of which one is named “Transfer”.

Clicking it reveals a drop-down menu with several options. Apparently the first option, “ATRAC Audio Device”, was my MP3-player. Hardly something I would call it, but I’m sure it’s the correct name of the device internally on Sony. The device on the drop-down menu also seems a little misplaced because the other options are actions like: “Create an Audio CD”, while the mp3-player is just a name of a device.

Although Sony makes a decent mp3 player they haven’t put enough effort into the whole user experience with the product. One of the companies that do think of this is Apple. They’ve managed to combine iPod, iTunes and the iTunes Store in a way so that they integrate nicely and each contribute to the entire user experience.

Do you have examples of obtrusive and annoying software that comes with your gadgets. Or maybe example of where the software actually elevates the whole experience of the product?