I've been on a usability/design kick for about the last six months. Somehow I stumbled across a link to Robert Hoekman Jr's site which was described as great design books for programmers. I fully recognize the fact that I really don't have that little spark that good designers have, but I'd like to be better at it than I am. So I've been eager to find usability and design books that work for visually-clumsy folks like me. Robert Hoekman's pair of books, Designing the Obvious and Designing the Moment were wonderful additions to my growing design-for-code-dorks library.
The covers of both books were what initially piqued my interest. Both have very simple white covers. Unlike a lot of design books, this one isn't about showing off a bunch of pyrotechnics on the cover (see Jenifer Tidwell's Designing Interfaces which includes a colored version of O'Reilly's usual animal lithograph). I figured anyone willing to put such a sparse cover on the page was pretty confident about the content inside. I also really liked the fact that the form-factor of both books is smaller than the usual trade paperback and comes in at a very economic 200 pages, or about 1/4" thick.
Alright, I'll admit that I was taken in by the author's use of my favorite font, Gill Sans. I just love this font (it's the font this blog is set to if you don't override CSS) because it's clean and elegant with a minimum–or complete absence–of decorative fuss. Unlike the Pragmatic Programmers or O'Reilly the publisher, New Riders, doesn't seem enforce a particular font style for their books. Therefore I think it's safe to assume that the author made a conscious decision to use this font which, at a microscopic level, supports many of the notions of simplicity and cleanliness presented in the books.
Designing The Obvious
His first book, Designing the Obvious focuses on translating from what a user needs to creating workable screen-flows. While I've knocked out several smaller design books, I've been slowly making my way through Alan Cooper's seminal About Face in which the concept of goal-oriented design is introduced. Hoekman's book is the second text I've come across that offers a contrasting opinion on goal-oriented design the author calls task-oriented design. Whereas Cooper's approach is to begin design by understanding a user's goal within the larger context of their lives or career aspiration, task-oriented design is focused on more immediate desires.
A goal-oriented design might start with something like "Anna is a small-business owner who wants to balance career and family. She needs particular help with payroll for her small three-person company." A task-oriented design might start with "A user with a small-company must be able to setup employees with a minimum of fuss: perhaps just name, address and social security number". Hoekman even titles one of his chapters "Understand Users, Then Ignore Them".
Each chapter is tightly-focused on a single concept and few supporting ones. For example, the chapter titled "Turn Beginners Into Intermediates, Immediately" spends a thrifty thirty-five pages outlining the basic distribution of user expertise (hint: the big fat blob in the middle are the intermediate users) and then enumerating several concrete examples of how to serve the intermediates, how to get the beginners to immediates as quickly as possible, and how to keep the advanced users still engaged.
The ability of Hoekman to outline a concept and back it up with several concrete examples is the real strength of the book. This is not a patterns or recipe book. Similarly it's not a grand philosophical tome (see Cooper, above). Instead it's a very practical work intent on getting the ideas across, but leaving plenty of room for the reader to explore on their own.
The fact that he gets such a rich amount of information is such a small package is a testament to the author's well-thought, lean design approach.
5 out of 5 stars
Designing The Moment
Hoekman's second title focuses specifically on web application design. Unlike his previous book which is more philosophical and abstract, Designing The Moment is much more concrete. With thirty-one chapters spread out over 220 pages, each chapter is tightly-focused. Those chapters are split up into seven major sections.
The first section is titled Getting Oriented and focuses on getting the user oriented with your site. He delves into how users' eyes flow over a page, navigation, links and dealing with common web paradigms like tag clouds.
The second section, Learning, provides specifics about getting users "over the novice hump". This theme was an important one in his first book and here he offers several ways to teach your users about your site.
The third section, Searching, walks you through the pitfalls of search interface design. A common theme in both books is that of a poke-yoka, which means to fool-proof in Japanese. The term was originally derived from Toyota's Production System which was developed in the '80's (note: Toyota is currently kicking serious rear-end in the car biz). Here he uses the term poke-yoka device to mean any mechanism that will help prevent the user from hurting themselves. This is not about treating users as idiots but rather hiding ugly implementation details away from the users if at all possible. For example, you if need users to enter a phone number in a particular format, design a form that makes so that users enter phone numbers in that format. Don't just give them a text field and then complain when they don't get it right.
Moving on we get to fourth section, titled Diving In, where we really start to get into the nitty-gritty details of things like media player controls, form layout, wizards, and validation. This is the longest section of the book and meatiest. Again, Hoekman nails the concepts with well-chosen representative examples and solutions.
The fifth section, Participating focuses on the mechanics of features commonly associated with "social-networking" web applications. This chapter ranges from concrete implementation recommendations like how to build user profiles, to more abstract, strategic concepts like how to embrace user feedback and how to channel your most vocal users.
The sixth section, Managing Information, provides some tips on helping users digest your site's contents. Tips here include how to effectively use syndication, dealing with tags and folksonomies, where drag-and-drop is appropriate and dealing with system notifications.
The final section, Moving On, embraces I concept I first saw articulated in 37Signals' Getting Real . Don't build your apps as walled gardens where you make every attempt to keep your users from leaving. This ain't Vegas you aren't a casino. Yes, you want to give users another chance to reconsider and you certainly want to know why they're leaving, but don't be a jerk about it. This section offers some guidelines for parting ways with your users. I think to design something without this in mind is to the fact that not everyone is going to dig what you've built. Let them go easily and don't make things worse by making parting a painful experience.
I loved this book as much as Hoekman's first title. Both are handy references I'll keep nearby.
5 out 5 stars.