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18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Needs some weight, August 5, 2008
This review is from: Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action (Paperback)
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.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent resource, April 28, 2008
This review is from: Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action (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.
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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, May 13, 2008
This review is from: Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action (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!
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