Designing the Obvious Moment
Robert Hoekman Jr. has written two quite excellent books on user interface and interaction design. I read these books earlier this year, but thought I'd finally get to blogging about them as part of my ongoing book reviews.
Designing the Obvious was the first of the two books and, for me, the more successful of the two. It's rich with UI design aphorisms that simply make good common sense. Written in a simple, conversational style that draws heavily from actual Web application development experience, this book, and its counterpart just make sense. The book deserves to be read by anyone who actually builds any kind of Web application user interface, no matter how simple or complex. One of the things I really liked about his approach was the whole concept of turning beginning users into intermediate users quickly. That was the inspiration for my whole series of posts on the Contextual Guidance API. His outright demand that you make it simple, eliminate anything unnecessary in the app and in the design, and focusing on how you accomplish a task at every moment within the application is great advice. My team has taken that advice to heart and has begun designing our new applications around much of Hoekman's advice in this book. The result has been applications that visually make more sense to our clients, and clients that are really happy with what we're developing.
Designing the Moment is focused on very common, very specific moments of interaction with a Web application and how they can be made better. It's less cohesive as the previous book, which took more of a big-picture view to the art and process of designing user interfaces. In this book, the examples are very specific, somewhat less generalizable, but many of the same principles from Designing the Obvious come in to play. My sincere feeling is that a number of the solutions presented in this book will become outdated over the next couple of years (ie; blog and social networking site design) but, again, the basic principles of clarity, task-orientation and removing all but the essential are more than sound.
Designing the Obvious should be mandatory reading for all Web application developers, even those who rarely work on the UI. At the end of the day, the interface is the application, no matter what application you're using. Knowing how to create great interfaces is key to building great applications.
