Aarron Walter
Author
Designing for Emotion
A Book Apart
It’s not enough for our websites to be usable. They need to be human. Designing for Emotion will share insights into psychology and design principles that will help you make brands, products, and services emotionally engaging.
- buy the book
- Available in paperback and ebook (ePub, PDF, and mobi formats).
Walter’s approach is direct, rigorous, at times scientific and filled with practical insight and humor.
Every now and then a book comes along that changes the way you think about the web. This is one of them. The web is made for humans, and ‘Designing for Emotion’ does a fantastic job explaining how to keep that in mind. Two swissmiss thumbs up!
Feeling depressed and lonely, career-wise, design-wise? Do you feel constrained to produce dull, dreary designs? Do your pleas for excitement and emotional content fall on deaf ears? My prescription: 15 minute sessions reading Aarron Walter’s book ‘Designing for Emotion,’ three times a day. Continue until the symptoms disappear. If the symptoms persist, do not despair: reread the book.
If a single, small book can shatter the notion that we’re designing for page views not for people, this is that book.
Redesigning With Personality
Smashing Book #3
Smashing Book #3, Redesign, features a chapter entitled Redesigning With Personality written by yours truly. It was released as a free download prior to the publication of the book.
Well-respected professionals have poured their heart and expertise into each chapter. The Smashing Book #3 consists of 11 quality chapters with expert advice and experience from such industry experts as Andy Clarke, Aral Balkan, Elliot Jay Stocks, Paul Boag, Christian Heilmann and more.
Building Findable Websites
Web Standards SEO and Beyond
This is not another SEO book written for marketing professionals. In this book you’ll find practical advice and examples for people who build websites hoping that they’ll reach their target audience. Each chapter will introduce you to best practices and fresh perspectives on how websites should be built to accomplish these simple, yet indispensable goals:
- Help more people find your site
- Help users find content within your site
- Encourage return visits
Information that’s hard to find will remain information that’s hardly found. In Building Findable Web Sites, Aarron Walter provides an invaluable guide to avoiding obscurity on today’s cluttered Web.
Companies waste fortunes seeking a magic bullet for Search Engine Optimization. But the keys to honest, effective web findability are appropriate writing and semantic markup. Aarron Walter’s wonderfully lucid and informative book tells everything you need to know to get your web content (or your client’s) in front of as many appreciative readers as possible.
If you optimize for people, which usually involves producing well marked-up relevant content, then you will get the approval of the ‘bots and algorithms by default …because that’s exactly the kind of content that they are trying to find and rank. This is the approach taken by Aarron Walter in his excellent book Building Findable Websites.
InterACT With Web Standards:
A Holistic Approach to Web Design
From code to copy, and Information Architecture to Accessibility, InterACT With Web Standards provides readers with an invaluable perspective of how the various facets of the web design profession fit together.
The Web represents the leading edge of 21st century publishing, communications, and application design. Unfortunately, web education is still in the dark ages. InterACT With Web Standards presents a badly needed course correction. Armed with this book, educators can better serve tomorrow’s web designers, and through them, millions of users.
Interested in getting started creating content and applications for the web but don’t know where to start? InterACT with Web Standards is a solid resource that brings together all the disparate knowledge necessary to come up to speed with modern web development practices. What a great book!
Employers like me are constantly looking for fresh web design talent. But young people entering the market with the right skill set–whether formally trained or self-taught–are few and far between. InterACT With Web Standards is the right way for educators prepare their students for today’s workplace.
SEO and Beyond
A Holistic Approach to Findability
Join me in my design studio as I demonstrate a holistic approach to building findable websites.
The video shows web designers and developers how to help their audience find their web content and rediscover it later. Viewers will learn the basic concepts behind SEO and findability, as well as practical web standards by watching me take a real world project from paper to pixel.
The video will help you:
- Improve your websites by taking a holistic approach to planning, designing, and developing.
- Improve the findability of your websites using web standards.
- Avoid making simple mistakes that impact findability.
Other Publications
- “The Expanding Role of User Experience Design.” UXMag. May 25, 2011. Web
- “Personality in Design.” A List Apart. Oct 18, 2011. Web
- “Emotional Interface Design.” Think Vitamin. 23 Apr. 2010. Web.
- “Brighter Horizons for Web Education.” A List Apart. 20 Jan. 2009. Web.
- “Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry.” A List Apart. 25 Mar. 2008.
- “Improving Findability Through Web Standards.” Peachpit. New Riders, 16 May 2008.
- “How to Create Content That Sucks (Users In).” Peachpit. New Riders, 4 Apr. 2008.
- “Creating Flash Content that Even Search Engines Like.” Peachpit. New Riders, 19 Sept. 2008.
- “Use Ajax and PHP to Build your Mailing List.” Sitepoint. 1 Nov. 2006.
- “Speedy Feed Reading With Ajax And Magpie.” DMXzone. 1 Dec. 2006.
