Customer Reviews

Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action

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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.

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!

I was really expecting something out of this title after reading the previous Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design but the book turned out to be a little disappointment. It contains 31 short chapters that put the principles of the previous book in to use. Some of the topics discussed like signing in, forms and so on can give you a few really nice ideas to be used in a project.

The point is that these few topics could have been published as online articles as they hardly have enough to say to put together a whole book. If the book would've been published a couple of years ago the "not so interesting" topics could have also been worth printing. The language is easy and really fast to read so you can quickly skim the book through and then concentrate on the interesting topics with more thought.

This title clearly falls in to the box of average things...

This thin book often feels like a hurried rehash of Hoekman's earlier book, Designing the Obvious. Both have the same format: A series of examples of common web interface elements (e.g. log-in forms, shopping carts, navigation bars) and how they can be tweaked slightly to prove the user with a smoother experience.

It's an enjoyable and quick read, but unless your project happens to be using any of the exact elements in the book, what's important is the intuition that you develop from reading Hoekman, the desire to think just outside of the box of standard web design patterns to make things better for your users. It should only take one book to teach that intuition, not two.

This book might be worth skimming for the handful of novel ideas it contains, but I was hoping for something more cohesive and original.

I recommend this book and Designing the Obvious to web designers, and burgeoning IA's . These two books combined take seemingly daunting but painfully simple interfaces and functionality and turn them into easy cheezy solutions that are plug-n-play ready to go! No matter what type of website you are working on, these core pieces allow you to embrace to basic in order to excel in the complex. Such a breeze to read, and fun too! Robert, you're amazing. If I could ever work with you, it would be a dream come true! Thank you for all the time and energy you put into these books to help make the rest of our jobs much easier!

There are many useful concepts illustrated in this book, including:

* Gutenberg diagram-Primary optical area and terminal anchor
* Ambient signifiers by Ross Howard - color, size, transparency level
* The goal to create positive moments, with a great example of the use of autocomplete
* Video!
* Display validation pre-submit, aka check boxes which activate next to a validated form as the user tabs through the interface
* Many other nuanced goodies

One of the greatest compliments is that this book doesn't go far enough, yet its core message is to go further than we have gone, hence it is a book on the path...

Some criticisms

* Talks smack about former client
* Doesn't go far enough in reducing instruction text
* In showing character count in Twitter, does not indicate a "going over limit" could be handled
* Use of the phrase (e.g., me@mydomain.com) after an attendee email form field label-do we really have people who don't know what an email address looks like? And if so, are they really going to learn it on this website?
* Repetitive use of text, e.g., attendee first name, attendee last name, attendee email
* Heavy use of drop-downs
* Wants to (needlessly) coin the term protocast, for a screencast used for a demo/walkthrough
* Inconsistency in handling question marks as helper links in an interface (uses both ? and what's this? instead of simply ?

But these complaints are largely trying to hold the book to the standard it is trying to create for the interface designer. In other words, any of its detractions and failures are largely seen as indicators of its success in making us think more deeply about what it means to design for the moment.

Thank you sir.

Designing the Moment is one of those books that make sure you don't instantly forget what you've read. It's easy and almost fun to read and filled with practical advice - mostly because it really focuses on these mini moments.

The book provides more than just a set of possible solutions to problems; it also explains why these solutions work and what the problems are. This means you not only get the tips, you get why they work and that's worth so much more.

Robert Hoekman Jr. second book, Designing the Moment, focuses on improving the online user experience. His approach is a practical one: design interfaces that respect users and allow them to feel in control.

Robert's goal is to inspire the web professional to "improve the moment" for users. His storytelling method of explaining strategies makes the 220 page book a quick and fun read. The book contains 30 stories, based on his own experiences of real-world applications and the step-by-step approach taken toward resolving design interaction issues.

The stories are concise, and offer a critique of each phase as changes are made to interfaces. Robert has a "think out loud" method which allows the reader to better understand the decision making process. Question steps along the way and don't hesitate to make decisions you might change in the future. Designing interfaces is an iterative process.

Designing the Moment assumes the reader has knowledge of web design and development; it does not provide the specific code to implement the recommendations. As Robert mentions in the book, "This book is meant as a conversation starter. It's meant to get you thinking".

The book is divided into seven parts:
Part 1: Getting Oriented - give a good first impression to the user
Part 2: Learning - make it easier for users to find their way around
Part 3: Searching - improve the search interface
Part 4: Diving In - great tips on improving forms and video controls
Part 5: Participating - focus on social media
Part 6: Managing Information - how to manage lots of information
Part 7: Moving On - the sign out process

My favorite story in the book is in Chapter 7, where Robert discusses the simplicity of clear labels. Make it easy for users to to use applications. Provide users with simple, easy to understand labels and instructions. On forms or applications, rather than displaying an error message that the user didn't enter information in a valid format, add informative text on the form or application form field that describes what is acceptable.

Designing the Moment is a wonderful resource for information architects, usability experts, interaction designers and developers. I highly recommend it!

Like many of you here, I write web apps. Some are written in the context (and confines) as hobbyist, others are for the job. I'm fortunate enough to have my passion and my career follow parallel disciplines. Unfortunately, it means when I'm stuck on something, its effecting me TWICE as bad as I can neither work nor play! I found this book quite by accident, digging through the digital stacks on web applications, and rocketed through it within a weekend - seriously, I winced every time I closed it, and could only think about when I could squeeze in some more time with it.

First and foremost: this book is not a "How To" in the strict sense of the phrase - it will not give you a primer on web application design from end-to-end. Which was great, I wasn't looking for someone to come around and up-end my own methodologies, my own principles, etc and tell me "this is how you do it." Instead, this book is a "this is how I do it" book: Mr. Hoekman will walk you through efforts he himself has made on behalf of his clients to better their web application experience. He describes and defines these zen-like 'moments' when the interface just 'works', and how he looks to create them whenever possible. The book is beautifully illustrated as these ideas take shape so you can see the progression. He really broadened my understanding of some core concepts on interface and how they are perceived by users that I have been overlooking, or simply ignoring as being irrelevant.

To re-state: you won't see a single line of HTML/Javascript/Perl/PHP/Ruby here! It's a wonderful departure from the tick-and-tack of the technical and I plan to keep it within arm's reach for those times when I need a mental 'reboot'.

I ordered his earlier book, Designing the Obvious, recently as well and can't wait. Robert: If I ever run into you in a Phoenix-area Starbucks I'll have to shake your hand ;)