Mathis L. User Interface Design for Humans

Pragmatic Programmers, 2011. — 315 p.This is a book for visual designers and programmers. It’s not, however, about visual design or about code. Instead, it’s about something much more important: the people who will be using your product.
The best product is of no consequence whatsoever if people don’t use it. You can create the most beautiful, sturdiest, most elegant brush in the world, but if nobody uses it to paint a picture, your work was in vain. This book helps you make products — applications and websites — that people will want to use.
There are two kinds of chapters in this book: technique chapters and idea chapters. Each technique chapter explains a specific technique you can use during the design process to make your product more user-friendly: storyboarding, usability tests, or paper prototyping, for example. Technique chapters explain concrete things you can do — the tools for your designer’s tool belt.
Idea chapters, on the other hand, talk about ideas or concepts in more general terms: how to write usable text, how realistic your designs should look, when to use animations, and so on. Idea chapters explain things to think about and consider while coming up with designs.Part I Research.
User Research.
Job Shadowing and Contextual Interviews.
Personas.
Activity-Centered Design.
Time to Start Working on Documentation.
Text Usability.
Hierarchies in User Interface Design.
Card Sorting.
The Mental Model.
Part II Design.
Sketching and Prototyping.
Paper Prototype Testing.
Realism.
Natural User Interfaces.
Fitts’s Law.
Animations.
Consistency.
Discoverability.
Don’t Interrupt.
Instead of Interrupting, Offer Undo.
Modes.
Have Opinions Instead of Preferences.
Hierarchies, Space, Time, and How We Think About the World.
Speed.
Avoiding Features.
Removing Features.
Learning from Video Games.
Part III Implementation.
Guerilla Usability Testing.
Usability Testing.
Testing in Person.
Remote Testing.
How Not to Test: Common Mistakes.
User Error Is Design Error.
A/B Testing.
Collecting Usage Data.
Dealing with User Feedback.
You’re Not Done.