Intuitive Design: Eight Steps to an Intuitive UI - Softcover

McKay, Everett N; Nance, Rob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0999612506 ISBN 13: 9780999612507

Publisher: Black Watch Publishing, 2018

Synopsis

Make your designs immediately self-explanatory and easy to use, and never “agree to disagree” again about whether they are intuitive! Your mission: To design an intuitive UI for your next project. Your problem: You’re not sure what “intuitive UI” really means. Worst problem: Your team isn’t sure either, so your discussions about intuitive design are unproductive and opinion-driven. If this sounds familiar, Intuitive Design: Eight Steps to an Intuitive UI will give you the insight, principles, and guidelines you need to get the job done. You’ll learn the objective and actionable steps for designing intuitive UIs—for mobile, web, and desktop apps. Mission accomplished!

About this title

From the Author

Designing intuitive apps is one of the most important objectives for modern UX designers. Yet surprisingly, many designers have only a vague understanding of what makes a UI intuitive. I know because I ask them (when appropriate, of course!) Typical responses are easy to use, familiar, and learnable. Close but not quite. How can we achieve this important design objective if we don't really understand it?Intuitive Design: Eight Steps to an Intuitive UI starts with a practical definition based on the desired outcome: designing UIs that are immediately self-explanatory. How do we know if a design is immediately self-explanatory? Because users can achieve their goals without thinking, experimentation, memorization, documentation, or training--having to resort to any of these measures means the design has failed. This is the definition of "intuitive design" that I use.The next challenge: How do you make that happen? For that, Intuitive Design explores a framework based on the interaction sub-steps required to achieve the user's goal, which I call The Eight Steps to Intuitive UI. The steps are discoverability, affordance, comprehensibility, responsive feedback, predictability, efficiency, forgiveness, and explorability. If your design has these attributes, users will be able to achieve their goals in a way that is immediately self-explanatory. If any are missing, chances are you have found a problem. Mission accomplished!My objective in writing Intuitive Design was to make the content as fun, practical, and approachable as possible. There is an Eight Steps poster that holds the concept together visually. There are over 200 real examples to illustrate each design principle. I use a "mobile first" presentation style as mobile, touch-based, responsive design is so critical today. (And to be clear, "mobile first" doesn't mean "mobile only", so don't worry if you are designing desktop apps.) Most importantly, I designed the book to be easy to scan. By scanning the headings, bold text, examples, and captions, you can easily get the gist of the book in under an hour.There are seven chapters, all but one is short. Here is a quick summary of each:

• Chapter 1 explains why intuitive UIs are important from the business point of view--crucial information to get your team, managers, executives, and clients on board. 
• Chapter 2 explores the definition of intuitive UI and works through the implications. 
• Chapter 3 presents The Eight Steps to Intuitive UI, and is the heart of the book. This is the one big chapter and where you will spend most of your time. There is a quick case study at the end, which puts everything together by designing a common pattern one step at a time.
• Chapter 4 explores common alternative definitions to intuitive design, such as familiar and learnable, and explains why these are secondary and usually optional. 
• Chapter 5 explores how not all designs need to be intuitive--that intuitive design is a tradeoff and sometimes other objectives are more important. Its goal is to help you make this tradeoff strategically rather than accidentally. 
• Chapter 6 presents a higher-level framework for making task flows intuitive by using a tool called main instructions. This chapter demonstrates this enormously powerful tool that can give you remarkable insight on the quality of a page design in just a few minutes by working through several real examples.
• Chapter 7 presents tools and techniques that you can use to make UIs intuitive using your existing design process. It explores how to make usability testing, design reviews, and design feedback more effective and productive.

This book is valuable to UX designers at all levels. For new designers, it presents a great introduction to design thinking, and will help make your approach to design much more objective. For intermediates, it helps you leverage your existing knowledge and fills in a lot of gaps. You will have a more solid understanding of design, which will help you sell your designs more persuasively. For experts, it helps you establish a shared framework, vocabulary, and process to help your team communicate and evaluate their ideas more effectively.So, do you need to read this book? Here's a simple test: Suppose you need to convince a manager or client that a design is intuitive (or alternatively, unintuitive and needs to be improved.) What does that conversation look like now? Is it mostly subjective, personal opinion? Are there a lot of vague metaphors and questionable assertions? A lot of "agreeing to disagree"? If this sounds familiar, Intuitive Design is exactly what you need to do your best design work and get your team onboard.Enjoy!

From the Back Cover

Whether you're new to UI design or an established veteran, Everett McKay's practical yet conclusive Intuitive Design deserves a prominent place on your bookshelf. But keep it within easy reach, as you'll revisit often to use the actionable UI tips it presents.Jon Walter, UX Architect at Rockwell AutomationIntuitive Design precisely summarizes the most important lessons from The Design of Everyday Things in a way that makes them easy to apply. If you're a fan of Don't Make Me Think, you'll love how Everett gets to the point with practical ideas and examples. The evaluation method offered in the book makes it simple to identify what makes UIs unintuitive and what you need to do to fix them. I highly recommend this book to anyone responsible for make the user's interactions intuitive.Mike Donahue, UX Architect at Citrix SystemsHaving adopted Everett's approach to design, I can attest that my team experienced a significant and immediate improvement in our designs. We felt equipped to effectively evaluate designs and, most important, comfortably explain to stakeholders and users the merits of our design decisions.  Our user satisfaction scores skyrocketed! If you're looking for an easy-to-follow, lightweight, common-sense approach to intuitive software design, I can't recommend Intuitive Design highly enough!"William Shellenberger, Business Systems Analyst at Bayada Home Health CareWhat do people mean by an unintuitive UI? Design problems are hard to fix when you don't know what's wrong. Put an end to subjective arguments over good and bad design. In Intuitive Design, Everett gives you the tools to understand what makes designs intuitive and how to evaluate them on an objective basis. As a college student, it has help me tremendously in evaluating my own projects. Noah Patullo, student at University of Vermont

Edition details

• Publisher: Black Watch Publishing
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0999612506
• ISBN 13: 9780999612507
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 216
• Editor: Musgrave Devon
• Illustrator: Hersh Jodi