Book Review: Designing the Obvious, Designing the Moment
User Experience Designer Robert Hoekman Jr has written a pair of wonderfully lucid books that examine best practices in interaction design. In Designing the Obvious, and Designing the Moment, Hoekman extolls the virtues of understanding specific user tasks rather than generalized user personas. It’s easiest to design usable interfaces when the activity it serves is clearly understood.
Designing the Obvious contains a canon of heuristics developed from careful study of user behavior. As the title suggests, with knowledge of user expectations, and a little understanding of design patterns, an interface can make the steps to performing a task obvious.
Designing the Moment picks up where its predecessor leaves off by pointing out that each smaller interaction adds up to a bigger experience. This book is all about defining our user’s goals, and identifying how we can best help them achieve them.
The conversational tone of Hoekman’s writing and the bounty of compelling, real-world examples he uses to drive home each principle make porting his recommendations into your practice easy. These books read easy, and contain lots of practical information that’s sure to be applicable to your next website or application design project.
