Customer Reviews

Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was very excited waiting for this book and after reading the reviews I decided to buy it. After reading it, I'm wondering if the reviewers actually read the book??? I spent some time writing this because I would like to see books better written and more useful. This is just my opinion, so read other reviews as well.


*Book direction*
Dan tried to cover too much. After all "interaction" is an extremely broad term and I think it would be much better if the book would focus more on "Interactive Systems Design", the design for interactions in systems and technology. Jesse James Garrett, did an excellent job in his book The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web by focusing it on web applications, although you can extrapolate what you learn there to a more general approach of UX. I believe that if Dan would have done the same, the book would became an excellent book and a reference book.

In my opinion, Saffer could have made this book into a reference book by being the Editor and writing about what he knows best, e.g., craft of Interaction Design (IxD):
- Each chapter could have been written by an expert in that area
- The introduction is very general, with statement that I don't really agree and I felt it is very personal - what Dan things about IxD. I read it all for the safe of being entitled to write this, but I didn't find it useful at all.


*Great*
- The Interviews: they cover very interesting topics and reading them gives a very quick and excellent insights of the topics they cover. (On the other hand, the text in the book repeats the interview points instead of going deeper). You can find the interviews online at [...].
- Organisation: very well organised and structured, which makes it easier to select what you want to read or when you want to go back to a chapter later on.
- The elements of IxD: this is quite interesting and to some extent useful. It misses some more work in the way the examples are used and in how to use these elements.
- Service chapter: this chapter is quite interesting and useful, however I would argue that it would belong to a book about User Experience.
- Very easy to read and not boring (except when you doubt about what he argues).


*Good*
- Putting it all together. The elements, interviews, aspects of good design, craft of IxD, and so forth. Great that a book puts all these together but it's a pity that was done very poorly. I still consider this good because it was a good piece of work Dan did and it will be useful for people staring with IxD. However, I look forward for such kind of book but well written.
- Size of the book: I wish more books were like this. Short and delivers the message. However, the text is not that well written and repeating most of the times what we got by reading the interviews. Instead Saffer could have picked up from the interview and explored the issues in a deeper way.
- Examples: are OK, but when the explanation started to be interesting he stops. Most of the times I felt he explains the obvious but not the design "genius" behind the product.


*Very bad*
- Meaningless text (not all): some explanations don't say more than what you see in the picture or you can read in the interview. The explanations are many times obvious instead of bringing up the design issues behind.
- No references/bibliography: Is Dan a god of IxD?? It seems so. Although he occasional refers to some people or books, there are no references at all. Not even in the end of each chapter. On one hand this makes the text very insecure and at sometimes I almost get the feeling that he is the only one believing on what he says or he is the only one that saw that example. On the other hand, saying that "this is common practice among designers" is not enough, especially when I know situations that are the opposite. In fact I cannot believe that such a book can be published without any references or bibliography. Maybe this book is a novel...
- Service Design: As I said above, I see this chapter rather in a book about User Experience. And the interviews somehow support my opinion by talking about User Experience. Perhaps, I could accept a service design chapter if Dan would have narrowed the services he talks about to more specific interactions. He might argue that Interaction Design is not just about technology but then he should have spent more time in writing the book and perhaps having other people as co-authors. In this early age of IxD it is much better to focus on concrete things, otherwise you risk you neck in talking about things that are actually from other disciplines.
- Some of the examples and explanations. I could almost say they are non-sense, but I think it just misses a bit more work to put the design explanation instead of describing the obvious. I hope I'll have time later on to put some here.

This book, in my opinion, is overrated! The book is good at collecting the arguable "elements for Interaction Design" but it doesn't deliver what the reviews say. You'd be better of by reading the interviews online and perhaps wait for a better book. If you cannot wait, then buy this one but read something else as well so you have a critical eye when reading the book and don't take everything for granted.

I think it would be useful to define and separate: "Interaction Design" and "Interaction Systems Design". The former is too general and the second is what I call what this book says it is "Interaction Design."
I'd recommend About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design and Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services (the best books on the topic with details on how-to) and Thoughts on Interaction Design (the best book on explaining Interaction Design, linking theory with practice and with excellent interviews as well as a quick and easy read).

Dan's book is an excellent primer on Interaction Design, one I'd reccommend to new and veteran practicioners. Although I've docked it a star for its lack of footnotes or even bibliography, it covers a lot of ground in a very readable way.

I especially like that Dan's avoided the easy path of just pointing out bad design, instead he really analyzes what makes *good* designs work. He's to be applauded, too, for including design approaches besides User-Centered Design. Other books in the field treat UCD as gospel; Dan puts other (and often more pragmatic) approaches on equal footing with UCD, rather than making designers who don't do round after round of usability testing feel guilty about it.

The book's punctuated by a series of interviews, which are fun to read. As another reviewer points out, the inclusion of Service Design, as well as the content in the last chapter (robots, ubiquitous computing, intelligent agents) makes the book timely and provacative.

I do wish "Designing for Interaction" had at least a section "for further reading" or selected bibliography. It's a bit of a dead end as it stands--where could I go to learn more about Service Design, for example? Dan's standing on the shoulders of a lot of other peoples' work here; I'd have liked to see this introductory text lead interested readers on to other books and articles.

This book reads like the author sat down on a weekend afternoon, typed out a draft and simply published it. The text is basically a sequence of obvious statements. In fact, this book is so bad I don't want to waste many words reviewing it. So I am going to randomly select 4 sentences from this book:

- Most applications and devices that interaction designers design have some sort of visible controls for the user to use to manipulate the features of the product. pg 136
- Designers should be open and nonjudgemental and should not assume that they know the answer beforehand. pg 80
- It is more important now than ever before that our digital tools have the characteristics of good interaction design baked into them. pg 203
- The system needs an assortment of responses to deal with a range of situations. pg 38

Believe me, I haven't chosen these lines consciously - I closed my eyes, turned to some page, put my finger down and typed the sentence my finger landed on. The whole book is filled with such drivel.

I wish I could give this item a rating of zero. Spend your money elsewhere.

The useful information in this book could be condensed into a 10 page article. The rest of the book is just irrelevant or uninformative photos, self evident ideas, and short interviews with designers. There is knowledge for designers between the covers - but not a bookload. This book tells you how to go about researching for design, but doesn't tell you anything about what other researchers have learned.
If you are looking for a book that helps you decide how to position the controls and labels on your latest widget, this isn't it.

When I originally added Saffer to my reading list I suppose I was hoping for, among other things, an IxD definition of "interaction"; a view of what it was they were `designing', and perhaps trace amounts of a critical language for analysis of existing (and in progress) artifacts. This was not the place to look. Saffer provides explanations of common phenomena such as Hick's and Fitt's law and a brief section on interfaces. Most of the material is focused on process and issues of problem definition. Products (like the ipod) are presented primarily in the context of the process of their creation. Critical analysis of artifacts is slim. While impressing (rightly) that success can be highly dependent on the proper definition of the design problem(s) at hand , Designing For Interaction becomes effervescent when it concerns actual designing.

As a broad summation of interaction design it offers bits of pieces for everyone, but seems aimed at no one. There are breadcrumbs of potentially useful information for practitioners, and overviews of topics that are likely no interest to students (If i were confronting interaction for the first time, I'd be far less interested in how to align to buisnes strategies and far more interested in exploring foundational formal issues.)

What I found most interesting is the discussion it led me to ([...]). Early in the book while covering various design methodologies Saffer touches on the `Genius' approach to design. Contrary to (various forms of) User Centric Design which place a strong emphasis on research and pre-production work, `Genius' is described as a process that relies on the exceptional experience and skill of an an individual or small group of designers above the preliminary qualitative research that UCD seems to hold sacred. There's then a brief interview with James Leftwich where James proposes the term `Rapid Expert Design' as an alternative to avoid various connotations of the latter. In both the book and online he attempts to describe the differences between RED and UCD related practices. Unfortunately both distill to common design practices in more established design fields; building experience through apprenticship and projects of increasing scale then increasingly relying on said experience to make and explore design decisions intuitively and quickly. To Saffer's credit, his shorter distillation of the `Genius' approach is probably as descriptive, brief, and fair as can be.

Luckily the conversation is advanced by the likes of Jonas Löwgren who manages to hit not only the thread's nail on the head, but put words to what's been bothering me about interactive design for years (and perhaps lacking in Designing for Interaction).

"As I read Jim's discussion of RED, the key is the abilities [opposed to methodologies] that the RED designer holds... A general problem in developing design ability is the relative inefficiency of the learning process. Apprenticing and peripheral participation is the most common strategy and it generally takes a long time to reach expert levels of experience and performance... Does the RED approach contain any provisions for increasing the pace of learning? Do you work systematically with product reviews and criticism in your teams? Do you have procedures for debriefing and knowledge sharing after project milestones and completions? How are you working with conceptual tools for articulation of practical knowing, such as patterns or experiential qualities?... I was thinking also of language constructs for talking about what constitutes good interaction. The way I see it, this is one of the main elements of interaction design expertise (the "experience" we talked about earlier in this thread) and my personal approach is to try and articulate so-called experiential qualities to try and create a language in which experienced designers can express and communicate parts of their judgment skills." - Jonas Löwgren

As passionate as Leftwich is about RED, and as measured as he is in expressing his points. He unfortunately lacks the critical language to articulate his (and others) experience. There's nothing wrong with mentoring, but there's nothing good about each generation learning everything through trial and error. Knowledge needs to be codified so it can be, at minimum, passed down. While structured methodologies like UCD that focus on preliminary research are valuable, they contain little design knowledge in of themselves.

While I don't fault Dan Saffer for somewhat neglecting this issue, I imagine that moderately skilled interactive and interaction designers with some experience will a little disappointed.

...what is Interaction Design, and why is it valuable?

Significant as an accessible work in a field that continues to define itself.

In clear, concise prose with personality, the book breaks Interaction Design (IxD) down into its essential building blocks and perspectives. Included is a brief history of the field, core concepts, frameworks of thinking, processes, tools, as well as timely ideas about the future of IxD.

I applaud the inclusion of Service Design. Often associated primarily with the business community, Service Design has huge implications for improving the way we interact in our daily lives and is an important addition to the design landscape.

For a satisfyingly-detailed overview, Interaction Design refresher, or reference begin here. This book can serve as a great tool for initiating discussion and establishing a common language and understanding of IxD within organizations.

This is an insightful and necessary read for anyone entering the field of interaction design/user experience but also serves as a wonderful refresher for current practitioners, covering all the major areas, from software to devices, to entire systems. With lucid, articulate, easy language Saffer explains what I regard as the fundamentals of interaction design: definitions, contexts, methods/approaches, and new frontiers, all backed by relevant and clear examples. Some noteworthy highlights: compact case studies of real designs (like Google's IM), interviews with veteran design pros like Hugh Dubberly, Marc Rettig, Shelley Evansen, and a sharp look at Service Design and design for devices. Saffer fluidly conveys what I've always struggled to express: interaction design is not just web design, but a mode of thought and action towards improving relationships.

With this book, Saffer is clearly poised to be an influential voice for interaction design, a field many of us practice unwittingly but few are able to explain effectively to broader audiences. Highly recommend!!

Dan does a wonderful job putting a stake in the ground on interaction design. He walks through the history and the breadth of designing in today's world. The books walks through the roles and practices that are needed for solid product design. Part of the book is interviewing the thought leaders and practitioners. I have been anxiously waiting for this book and it has met my expectations.

I am an aspiring interaction designer and this book by Dan Saffer really nails it for me in terms of laying down a coherent and well-written overview and framework.

This book is essential to the interaction design community in that it defines clearly what interaction design is (and is not) in this early stage of this new industry.

It is also essential reading for all beginning or aspiring interaction designers.

Dan Saffer deserves to be congratulated on producing an excellent in-depth introduction to the topic of Interaction Design.

I've put off purchasing this book for a while as there was only one other review of this book on Amazon.co.uk for ages, that gave no idea of what ground was covered or what value the book offered. I then recently saw the book listed in Smashing Magazines' 'Top 10' for great web/usability/design books, and bought it on the strength of this review.

I have not been disappointed, and this is now one of my favourite design books, as it works well both as a well written overview of the topic, as well as a useful source of reference if you are starting to work on either an interactive product or digital (or both) project.

Chapter headings include:

Ch1: What is Interaction Design?
Ch2: Starting Points
Ch3: Interaction Design Basics
Ch4: Design Research & Brainstorming
Ch5: The Craft of Interaction Design
Ch6: Interface Design Basics
Ch7: Smart Applications & Clever Devices
Ch8: Service Design
Ch9: The Future of Interaction Design
Epilogue: Designing for Good

The text is well written, with excellent supporting illustrations, photos and diagrams that complement the clearly explained text throughout. The book is well structured and each chapter builds well on the preceding topic.

One feature I particularly liked was that most chapters have a guest interviewee who is a subject matter expert answering a short series of interesting questions that add depth and perspective to the topic in hand.

Despite the book being relatively short (I see this as a positive at just over 200 pages), it acts as a great starter to the subject, and you can then conduct more in-depth reading on specific chapters as your requirements determine.

My only small gripe with the book is this very point - that there are not reference sources for future research at the end of each chapter or at the end of the book. Dan - please note for your 2nd edition!

Despite being written in 2007, and considering how quickly technology moves along, this is still largely bang up-to-date. I would strongly recommend this as an excellent purchase for anyone interested in broadening their knowledge on this fascinating and increasingly important field of design.