Mathis - Designed for Use : Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web

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For Regula and Werner

This is a book for software managers, designers, and programmers. Its not, however, about management, visual design, or about code. Instead, its about something much more important: the people who will be using your product.

The best product is of no consequence whatsoever if people dont 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 productsapplications and websitesthat 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 dothe tools for your designers 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.

You can identify technique chapters by the cog on the first page.

All technique chapters follow the same basic outline. Since not all techniques work well in all situations, I start by quickly outlining the kinds of situations to which the technique applies. Then, I explain what the technique is and how to use it. I end many of the technique chapters with a specific example of the technique as applied to a fictional application we design as we proceed through the book.

Since Twitter apps are our generations Hello World example application, for the technique chapters well design a Twitter app. To make things interesting, were not designing a generic Twitter app. Our app is aimed at people who have to update Twitter accounts for their companies. We call this fictional application BizTwit.

Think of the technique chapters as recipes. Its OK to read the book from start to finish, but its also OK to delve into a specific topic. To that end, these chapters are typically short and to the point, and they contain references to further information both inside the book as well as in other books or on the Internet.

While technique chapters introduce specific techniques and explain how to apply them, idea chapters are less specific. They introduce concepts and are mostly meant as sources of inspiration, rather than as strict rules. Some of the idea chapters mention techniques or refer to technique chapters, but they focus on more general concepts: How realistic should design be? How can we use animation most effectively? What are modes? What can we learn from video games?