Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices

Building products and services that people interact with is the big challenge of the 21st century. Dan Saffer has done an amazing job synthesizing the chaos into an understandable, ordered reference that is a bookshelf must-have for anyone thinking of creating new designs.”
― Jared Spool, CEO of User Interface Engineering

Interaction design is all around us. If you’ve ever wondered why your mobile phone looks pretty but doesn’t work well, you’ve confronted bad interaction design. But if you’ve ever marveled at the joy of using an iPhone, shared your photos on Flickr, used an ATM machine, recorded a television show on TiVo, or ordered a movie off Netflix, you’ve encountered good interaction design: products that work as well as they look.

Interaction design is the new field that defines how our interactive products behave. Between the technology that powers our devices and the visual and industrial design that creates the products’ aesthetics lies the practice that figures out how to make our products useful, usable, and desirable.

This thought-provoking new edition of Designing for Interaction offers the perspective of one of the most respected experts in the field, Dan Saffer. This book will help you

• learn to create a design strategy that differentiates your product from the competition
  

• use design research to uncover people’s behaviors, motivations, and goals in order to design for them

• employ brainstorming best practices to create innovativenew products and solutions

• understand the process and methods used to define product behavior
  

It also offers interviews and case studies from industry leaders on prototyping, designing in an Agile environment, service design, ubicomp, robots, and more.

Dan Saffer (San Francisco) is a founder and principal of Kicker Studio, a San

Francisco-based design consultancy for consumer electronics, appliances,

devices, and interactive environments, specializing in touchscreens and

interactive gestures. In his "spare" time, he curates a site called No Ideas But In

Things that collects physical interfaces for design inspiration. He also oversees

a wiki for the collection of new interaction paradigms called Interactive

Gestures.