Designed for Use

This book is for designers, developers, and product managers who are charged with what sometimes seems like an impossible task: making sure products work the way your users expect them to. You'll find out how to design applications and websites that people will not only use, but will absolutely love. The second edition brings the book up to date and expands it with three completely new chapters.

Interaction design - the way the apps on our phones work, the way we enter a destination into our car's GPS - is becoming more and more important. Identify and fix bad software design by making usability the cornerstone of your design process.

Lukas weaves together hands-on techniques and fundamental concepts. Each technique chapter explains a specific approach you can use to make your product more user friendly, such as storyboarding, usability tests, and paper prototyping. Idea chapters are concept-based: how to write usable text, how realistic your designs should look, when to use animations. This new edition is updated and expanded with new chapters covering requirements gathering, how the design of data structures influences the user interface, and how to do design work as a team. Through copious illustrations and supporting psychological research, expert developer and user interface designer Lukas Mathis gives you a deep dive into research, design, and implementation--the essential stages in designing usable interfaces for applications and websites.

Lukas inspires you to look at design in a whole new way, explaining exactly what to look for - and what to avoid - in creating products that get people excited.

Lukas Mathis is the Frontend Lead at Swiss software company Appway, the leader in client onboarding for the financial services industry. His blog on design and usability at ignorethecode.net is read by tens of thousands of people each month, and his essays on design have been published on sites such as UX Magazine and Splashnology. He has created a number of online tools for UI design.