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.
Designing the Moment
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From the Back Cover
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.
About the Author
Robert Hoekman, Jr, is a passionate and outspoken user experience specialist and a prolific writer who has written dozens of articles and has worked with Seth Godin (Squidoo), Adobe, Automattic, United Airlines, DoTheRightThing.com, and countless others.
He also gives in-house training sessions and has spoken at industry events all over the world, including An Event Apart, Web App Summit, SXSW, Future of Web Design, and many others.
Robert is the author of the Amazon bestseller Designing the Obvious and its follow-up, Designing the Moment. His newest book, Web Anatomy, was coauthored by Jared Spool.
Learn more about Robert at rhjr.net. He is "rhjr" on Twitter.
He also gives in-house training sessions and has spoken at industry events all over the world, including An Event Apart, Web App Summit, SXSW, Future of Web Design, and many others.
Robert is the author of the Amazon bestseller Designing the Obvious and its follow-up, Designing the Moment. His newest book, Web Anatomy, was coauthored by Jared Spool.
Learn more about Robert at rhjr.net. He is "rhjr" on Twitter.
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First Sentence
Getting Oriented Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Getting Oriented Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
By R. PARKER
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Well, Robert Hoekman Jr has done it again.
In this follow up to Designing the Obvious, Hoekman Jr takes us on a journey through his thoughts and concepts on building truly great web applications.
It's very easy for programmers and developers to get bogged down, churning out feature-after-feature, without necessarily stopping to think about the 'why', as in, "why do we need to add this feature?", or the 'what': "what is this feature supposed to add to my application?".
In his book, Robert explains that we should be focusing on the activities (or 'moments' as he refers to them) that comprise our applications, and that every new feature should have a single purpose: to support the mindset of the user.
Steering clear of technical jargon, this book teaches everyone involved in the wider design process to focus on what is actually important: your customers.
For anyone who has read his first book, Designing the Obvious, this book may seem a little similar to the first - but on further examination it is obvious that is exactly why you should buy this book: it is written in exactly the same clear, concise and logical manner as the first, bringing a different edge and further enhancements to some existing concepts, with whole new chapters devoted to the new. Simplicity isn't easy to do, but Robert teaches us some very helpful techniques to examine our own designs and improve them, with thoughtful insights into how the user will view our changes thrown in along the way.
There used to only be one book that I would recommend to my colleagues wishing to further their knowledge in web interface design. Now there are two.
In this follow up to Designing the Obvious, Hoekman Jr takes us on a journey through his thoughts and concepts on building truly great web applications.
It's very easy for programmers and developers to get bogged down, churning out feature-after-feature, without necessarily stopping to think about the 'why', as in, "why do we need to add this feature?", or the 'what': "what is this feature supposed to add to my application?".
In his book, Robert explains that we should be focusing on the activities (or 'moments' as he refers to them) that comprise our applications, and that every new feature should have a single purpose: to support the mindset of the user.
Steering clear of technical jargon, this book teaches everyone involved in the wider design process to focus on what is actually important: your customers.
For anyone who has read his first book, Designing the Obvious, this book may seem a little similar to the first - but on further examination it is obvious that is exactly why you should buy this book: it is written in exactly the same clear, concise and logical manner as the first, bringing a different edge and further enhancements to some existing concepts, with whole new chapters devoted to the new. Simplicity isn't easy to do, but Robert teaches us some very helpful techniques to examine our own designs and improve them, with thoughtful insights into how the user will view our changes thrown in along the way.
There used to only be one book that I would recommend to my colleagues wishing to further their knowledge in web interface design. Now there are two.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
What is it about web design books? So many are either filled with lots of enormous photos or lots of "chat" about meetings, cups of coffee and pulling out laptops. "Design the Moment" has few of the former, but the latter come in thick and fast. All very amusing but not really what you want to read about.
This is a very small book, only about half normal computer book size, you could probably easily fit this into 100 pages of the larger size volume. I don't think you get a lot of "meat" with this book, just loads of chat and generalised suggestions about how to improve things. In this respect this book looks worse than it's predecessor, "Designing the Obvious". It concentrates soley on the author's past work. For example, there is a section on navigation here, but once you've waded through the introduction you just get one suggestion: set links according to user functions - um yeh! Navigation makes no other mention in the book. There is a similar section on blogs, where he goes into detail about how he chatted with the other members of the team and pulled out his laptop.
Quite frankly I think the RRP for this book (£29.99) would be laughable, even at half price it's pushing it. It's almost "coffee table" standard with some ideas thrown in (many of them common sense).
This is a very small book, only about half normal computer book size, you could probably easily fit this into 100 pages of the larger size volume. I don't think you get a lot of "meat" with this book, just loads of chat and generalised suggestions about how to improve things. In this respect this book looks worse than it's predecessor, "Designing the Obvious". It concentrates soley on the author's past work. For example, there is a section on navigation here, but once you've waded through the introduction you just get one suggestion: set links according to user functions - um yeh! Navigation makes no other mention in the book. There is a similar section on blogs, where he goes into detail about how he chatted with the other members of the team and pulled out his laptop.
Quite frankly I think the RRP for this book (£29.99) would be laughable, even at half price it's pushing it. It's almost "coffee table" standard with some ideas thrown in (many of them common sense).
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.2 out of 5 stars
20 reviews
20 of 23 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Needs some weight
5 Aug 2008
By Andrew Otwell
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent resource
28 April 2008
By Jamie Samland
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
Hoekman's style makes this a quick and very understandable read. Each chapter is overflowing with tips you can apply immediately to things you're working on right now. In many cases, he starts with some design that may not have any obvious problems, then iterate through improvements, thoroughly explaining WHAT he's improving on and WHY the improvement actually IS an improvement. The plentiful, full color screenshots are a huge help, to see exactly what the iterations produce.
12 of 15 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hoekman is to UX Design Lit as DeLillo is to Contemporary Fiction
14 May 2008
By Matthew D. Derby
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
Designing the Moment is an invigorating follow-up to Hoekman's paradigm-shifing debut Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design - a must-read for designers, marketers, business analysts, developers, and engineers of all persuasions. It's possible that these two books are the most important reads on the subject of web design to come out since Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition.
Hoekman comes across in these books as a supportive peer - a rare and refreshingly readable perspective in this genre. In clear, concise (obvious!) text, he manages to unpack and delineate complex processes and interactions with an energy and enthusiasm that's infectious. He is an evangelist for the church of the whiteboard, that primal collaborative zone where interactions are crafted and iterated upon with a single purpose in mind: making someone's life just a little bit easier, less frustrating by a single increment. It's easy to lose track of this goal. It's easy to get bogged down by all of the politics and the marketing hype and to forget that what we are doing as designers is helping people. Hoekman, in these books, continually brings us back to this core idea in a way that never feels didactic or condescending.
I should add that I'm not an avid reader of books on interaction design or user experience design, though I own many. This is because the bulk of the design texts I own are a real chore to slog through. There are a handful of authors, though, whose work I follow with enthusiasm. Of these few, Hoekman is the one author whose books I genuinely devour and press into the palms of my coworkers as soon as I finish the last sentence. These are vital texts - buy them both!
Hoekman comes across in these books as a supportive peer - a rare and refreshingly readable perspective in this genre. In clear, concise (obvious!) text, he manages to unpack and delineate complex processes and interactions with an energy and enthusiasm that's infectious. He is an evangelist for the church of the whiteboard, that primal collaborative zone where interactions are crafted and iterated upon with a single purpose in mind: making someone's life just a little bit easier, less frustrating by a single increment. It's easy to lose track of this goal. It's easy to get bogged down by all of the politics and the marketing hype and to forget that what we are doing as designers is helping people. Hoekman, in these books, continually brings us back to this core idea in a way that never feels didactic or condescending.
I should add that I'm not an avid reader of books on interaction design or user experience design, though I own many. This is because the bulk of the design texts I own are a real chore to slog through. There are a handful of authors, though, whose work I follow with enthusiasm. Of these few, Hoekman is the one author whose books I genuinely devour and press into the palms of my coworkers as soon as I finish the last sentence. These are vital texts - buy them both!
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