Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action (Voices That Matter)

Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action (Voices That Matter) | Robert Hoekman Jr. | Great stories on how to improve the user experience

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Designing the Mome...

	Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action (Voices That Matter) Robert Hoekman Jr. New Riders Press, 2008 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The trick to great design is knowing how to think through each decision so that users don't have to. In Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action, Robert Hoekman, Jr., author of Designing the Obvious, presents over 30 stories that illustrate how to put good design principles to work on real-world web application interfaces to make them obvious and compelling. From the first impression to the last, Hoekman takes a think out loud approach to interface design to show us how to look critically at design decisions to ensure that human beings, the kind that make mistakes and do things we don't expect, can walk away from our software feeling productive, respected, and smart.

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The perfect weapon to webapp coder block!

Like many of you here, I write web apps. Some are written in the context (and confines) as hobbyist, others are for the job. I'm fortunate enough to have my passion and my career follow parallel disciplines. Unfortunately, it means when I'm stuck on something, its effecting me TWICE as bad as I can neither work nor play! I found this book quite by accident, digging through the digital stacks on web applications, and rocketed through it within a weekend - seriously, I winced every time I closed it, and could only think about when I could squeeze in some more time with it.

First and foremost: this book is not a "How To" in the strict sense of the phrase - it will not give you a primer on web application design from end-to-end. Which was great, I wasn't looking for someone to come around and up-end my own methodologies, my own principles, etc and tell me "this is how you do it." Instead, this book is a "this is how I do it" book: Mr. Hoekman will walk you through efforts he himself has made on behalf of his clients to better their web application experience. He describes and defines these zen-like 'moments' when the interface just 'works', and how he looks to create them whenever possible. The book is beautifully illustrated as these ideas take shape so you can see the progression. He really broadened my understanding of some core concepts on interface and how they are perceived by users that I have been overlooking, or simply ignoring as being irrelevant.

To re-state: you won't see a single line of HTML/Javascript/Perl/PHP/Ruby here! It's a wonderful departure from the tick-and-tack of the technical and I plan to keep it within arm's reach for those times when I need a mental 'reboot'.

I ordered his earlier book, Designing the Obvious, recently as well and can't wait. Robert: If I ever run into you in a Phoenix-area Starbucks I'll have to shake your hand ;)

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Great stories on how to improve the user experience

Robert Hoekman Jr. second book, Designing the Moment, focuses on improving the online user experience. His approach is a practical one: design interfaces that respect users and allow them to feel in control.

Robert's goal is to inspire the web professional to "improve the moment" for users. His storytelling method of explaining strategies makes the 220 page book a quick and fun read. The book contains 30 stories, based on his own experiences of real-world applications and the step-by-step approach taken toward resolving design interaction issues.

The stories are concise, and offer a critique of each phase as changes are made to interfaces. Robert has a "think out loud" method which allows the reader to better understand the decision making process. Question steps along the way and don't hesitate to make decisions you might change in the future. Designing interfaces is an iterative process.

Designing the Moment assumes the reader has knowledge of web design and development; it does not provide the specific code to implement the recommendations. As Robert mentions in the book, "This book is meant as a conversation starter. It's meant to get you thinking".

The book is divided into seven parts:
Part 1: Getting Oriented - give a good first impression to the user
Part 2: Learning - make it easier for users to find their way around
Part 3: Searching - improve the search interface
Part 4: Diving In - great tips on improving forms and video controls
Part 5: Participating - focus on social media
Part 6: Managing Information - how to manage lots of information
Part 7: Moving On - the sign out process

My favorite story in the book is in Chapter 7, where Robert discusses the simplicity of clear labels. Make it easy for users to to use applications. Provide users with simple, easy to understand labels and instructions. On forms or applications, rather than displaying an error message that the user didn't enter information in a valid format, add informative text on the form or application form field that describes what is acceptable.

Designing the Moment is a wonderful resource for information architects, usability experts, interaction designers and developers. I highly recommend it!

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Showing the path that got him from requirement to solution...

Since I'm starting to pay more attention to user-interface concepts and design, I felt this book was required reading for me... Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action by Robert Hoekman, Jr. Besides offering a number of excellent concepts, he does so in a manner not often seen in other books. He tells you what he was thinking and how he got to that decision point. That's the kind of insight I need to improve my skills.

Contents:
Part 1 - Getting Oriented: Designing the First Impression; Showing Your Personality; Zen and the Art of Navigation; All Links Are Not Created Equal; Getting Your Head Out of the Tag Cloud
Part 2 - Learning: Surfacing the Trigger Words; Labeling the Interface; Beyond Words and Onto Video
Part 3 - Searching: Making Suggestions; Getting Through the Results; Refining Your Search
Part 4 - Diving In: Standardizing Playback Controls; Nailing Form Layout; Conquering the Wizard; Going the Extra Mile with Inline Validation; Simplifying Long Forms; Getting Them Signed In; Counting Characters
Part 5 - Participating: Building Profiles; Editing; Making Social Connections; Designing the Obvious Blog; Inviting Discussion; Getting a Good Rating
Part 6 - Managing Information: Making RSS Meaningful; Tagging It; Getting Reorganized with Drag-and-Drop; Managing Interruptions with System Notifications
Part 7 - Moving On: Signing Off; Dusting Off Dusty Users; Letting Them Go
Conclusion: The Keys to Great Design

Hoekman is well-known for design concepts, and I tend to like what he comes up with. The difference here over other books is that he starts off with a request or issue to solve, and then takes you through his mental process that got him to the resulting solution. For instance, All Links Are Not Created Equal... The need was to create a list of links for a call-center intranet page. The idea was to somehow communicate the current issues affecting the users, in chronological order, maximum five links. I would take the normal route (which is where he started) of just putting the last five links out there. But to communicate chronological order, that wouldn't work. Then he placed numbers in front of each link (1 to 5). OK, but still "flat" as he termed it. He started trying to incorporate a concept he learned about called "ambient signifiers", or ways to communicate information based on the way it's displayed. This led him to drop the numbers and use decreasing font sizes to show order and importance. Much better, but he still wanted more. He then stumbled on an "aging" technique whereby he would not only decrease the font size, but also lighten the text color the further down you went. This combination communicated both importance and age, and was exactly the solution he was looking for. Notice that he didn't go into it with a preconceived "spec" as to how it would work. But through his mental conversation, you see both how he got there and why he made the designs that he did.

I'm perfectly happy admitting I don't know it all when it comes to design concepts. But what I don't like is to read "do it this way because I said so" material that doesn't explain why. Hoekman makes that rare jump beyond "why" and reveals the imperfections and dead-ends before you get there. As such, this is one of the most valuable design books I've read.

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Few good ideas for a few specific web design topics

I was really expecting something out of this title after reading the previous Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design but the book turned out to be a little disappointment. It contains 31 short chapters that put the principles of the previous book in to use. Some of the topics discussed like signing in, forms and so on can give you a few really nice ideas to be used in a project.

The point is that these few topics could have been published as online articles as they hardly have enough to say to put together a whole book. If the book would've been published a couple of years ago the "not so interesting" topics could have also been worth printing. The language is easy and really fast to read so you can quickly skim the book through and then concentrate on the interesting topics with more thought.

This title clearly falls in to the box of average things...

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Needs some weight

Hoekmann's last book Designing the Obvious was pretty good: a short, readable survey of some user experience tactics and tips. Nearly all of it was applicable and relevant.

This book (published, what, a year later?) seems hurried and much more superficial. It's really just a collection of short essays that run the gamut from mildly useful to simply wrong. Unfortunately, Hoekman's decided that *none* of his user interface design advice needs support from research, usability, or even real-world implementations. It's the level of opinionated but poorly-backed up writing you'd expect from a weblog. What products or sites are these techniques used on, and how have they affected user behavior? Hoekman's central argument is that "the details matter", that the smallest aspect of a user experience is worth agonizing over. Is that true? It seems like it ought to be, but tinkering with the nuances of interactions seems like the *most* critical time to be able to measure improvements. Unfortunately, there's nothing here that really convinces me that a given idea is good, only short exercises often without any context.

Finally, Hoekman's writing style is exactly what you'd get on a weblog: overly informal, full of sentence fragments and inelegant constructions. NewRiders has shown a worsening trend to publish books that seem awfully lightly edited, to put it kindly.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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