Shop the new tech.book(store)
New! Introducing the tech.book(store), a hub for Software Developers and Architects, Networking Administrators, TPMs, and other technology professionals to find highly-rated and highly-relevant career resources. Shop books on programming and big data, or read this week's blog posts by authors and thought-leaders in the tech industry.
> Shop now
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.
{"itemData":[{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":28.38,"ASIN":"0321535081","isPreorder":0},{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":24.57,"ASIN":"0321749855","isPreorder":0},{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":27.19,"ASIN":"0321344758","isPreorder":0}],"shippingId":"0321535081::v1AygdJ%2BcWn3y81ekpIUXVTWFqsdDdFqcFZrZZVii7qxxNHl6o5P0%2FApZKewpwP2g558ZExxMUFilZV%2B0f1qsSiEoqCEHzjvuYKRnZue2b0%3D,0321749855::o2JbTiRwPlmRM4SIB8RXKAWy9Vj2EHPwXJeMUB%2F%2Bc3i0A4yKsE5BdmlcCkxfxoiRCnMTRezGUSf3ehbzNb3My4e3iyoTzT8SAQyfhyDJC4iGBBZdj7et5g%3D%3D,0321344758::yKJXGVOZk%2BnthBKv0ujtwsR45kZo2JqNV2%2FG60ETiNWCyzGy5XjURfnaZgThPFUbQGpVNLVdS2zrmV5ndoE4240IlRE63F9Q0Cp2h5bOusZudoZom0lJFQ%3D%3D","sprites":{"addToWishlist":["wl_one","wl_two","wl_three"],"addToCart":["s_addToCart","s_addBothToCart","s_add3ToCart"],"preorder":["s_preorderThis","s_preorderBoth","s_preorderAll3"]},"currenyCode":"USD","shippingDetails":{"xz":"same","yz":"same","xy":"same","xyz":"same"},"tags":["x","y","z"],"strings":{"addToWishlist":["add to wishlist","Add both to Wish List","Add all three to Wish List"],"addToCart":["Add to Cart","Add both to Cart","Add all three to Cart"],"showDetailsDefault":"Show availability and shipping details","shippingError":"An error occurred, please try again","hideDetailsDefault":"Hide availability and shipping details","priceLabel":["Price:","Price for both:","Price for all three:"],"preorder":["Pre-order this item","Pre-order both items","Pre-order all three items"]}}
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.
Robert Hoekman, Jr, is the author of the Amazon bestseller "Designing the Obvious" (1st and 2nd edition), "Designing the Moment," and "Web Anatomy" (coauthored by Jared Spool). He has also written dozens of articles for web-industry sites including Adobe, A List Apart, Peachpit, and InformIT.
Robert is a passionate and outspoken user experience specialist who has worked with Adobe, MySpace, Dodge, Craftsman, American Heart Association, Seth Godin (Squidoo), Automattic, United Airlines, and countless others.
He has spoken to packed rooms at industry events all over the world, including An Event Apart, Web App Summit, SXSW, Voices That Matter, and many others.
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.
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.
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!
