PDF Download User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide to Building User-Friendly Applications, by Travis Lowdermilk
Invest your time also for just couple of minutes to review a publication User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide To Building User-Friendly Applications, By Travis Lowdermilk Checking out a publication will never minimize as well as waste your time to be ineffective. Checking out, for some people end up being a demand that is to do everyday such as spending quality time for eating. Now, what about you? Do you prefer to check out an e-book? Now, we will certainly show you a new book qualified User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide To Building User-Friendly Applications, By Travis Lowdermilk that can be a new means to explore the expertise. When reading this book, you could obtain something to consistently remember in every reading time, also pointer by action.
User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide to Building User-Friendly Applications, by Travis Lowdermilk
PDF Download User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide to Building User-Friendly Applications, by Travis Lowdermilk
User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide To Building User-Friendly Applications, By Travis Lowdermilk. A task might obligate you to always enrich the expertise and encounter. When you have no enough time to improve it directly, you could get the experience and knowledge from checking out guide. As everybody recognizes, publication User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide To Building User-Friendly Applications, By Travis Lowdermilk is preferred as the home window to open up the globe. It means that reading book User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide To Building User-Friendly Applications, By Travis Lowdermilk will provide you a new method to find every little thing that you need. As the book that we will certainly offer here, User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide To Building User-Friendly Applications, By Travis Lowdermilk
This letter could not affect you to be smarter, but guide User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide To Building User-Friendly Applications, By Travis Lowdermilk that our company offer will stimulate you to be smarter. Yeah, at the very least you'll understand greater than others who don't. This is what called as the top quality life improvisation. Why needs to this User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide To Building User-Friendly Applications, By Travis Lowdermilk It's due to the fact that this is your preferred theme to review. If you such as this User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide To Building User-Friendly Applications, By Travis Lowdermilk theme about, why don't you check out guide User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide To Building User-Friendly Applications, By Travis Lowdermilk to enrich your conversation?
The here and now book User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide To Building User-Friendly Applications, By Travis Lowdermilk we offer here is not sort of normal book. You recognize, checking out currently doesn't mean to manage the published book User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide To Building User-Friendly Applications, By Travis Lowdermilk in your hand. You could obtain the soft documents of User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide To Building User-Friendly Applications, By Travis Lowdermilk in your gadget. Well, we mean that the book that we extend is the soft file of guide User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide To Building User-Friendly Applications, By Travis Lowdermilk The material and all points are same. The difference is only the kinds of guide User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide To Building User-Friendly Applications, By Travis Lowdermilk, whereas, this problem will exactly pay.
We discuss you additionally the way to get this book User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide To Building User-Friendly Applications, By Travis Lowdermilk without visiting guide establishment. You could continuously go to the web link that we provide and also all set to download and install User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide To Building User-Friendly Applications, By Travis Lowdermilk When many people are active to look for fro in the book store, you are quite easy to download the User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide To Building User-Friendly Applications, By Travis Lowdermilk right here. So, what else you will choose? Take the inspiration right here! It is not only providing the best book User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide To Building User-Friendly Applications, By Travis Lowdermilk but additionally the appropriate book collections. Right here we always give you the most effective as well as easiest means.
How do you design engaging applications that people love to use? This book demonstrates several ways to include valuable input from potential clients and customers throughout the process. With practical guidelines and insights from his own experience, author Travis Lowdermilk shows you how usability and user-centered design will dramatically change the way people interact with your application.
Learn valuable strategies for conducting each stage of the design process—from interviewing likely users and discovering your application’s purpose to creating a rich user experience with sound design principles. User-Centered Design is invaluable no matter what platform you use or audience you target.
- Explore usability and how it relates to user-centered design
- Learn how to deal with users and their unique personalities
- Clarify your application’s purpose, using a simple narrative to describe its use
- Plan your project’s development with a software development life cycle
- Be creative within the context of your user experience goals
- Use visibility, consistency, and other design principles to enhance user experience
- Collect valuable user feedback on your prototype with surveys, interviews, and usability studies
- Sales Rank: #772496 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-03-29
- Released on: 2013-03-29
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com Review
Travis Lowdermilk, author of "User-Centered Design," offers his top tips for building user-friendly applications
1. Steal (I mean borrow) from others.
So many developers feel like they have to create experiences from scratch. There’s absolutely no shame in looking at others’ work and implementing what you’ve learned. Obviously, I’m not advocating stealing of intellectual property, but it’s impossible to come up with amazing experiences all on your own. It takes inspiration! Don’t be afraid to learn from others.
2. Your users know more than you give them credit for.
Many developers get into mindset that the users are the enemy. They’re the angry hoard collecting outside their office door shouting, “When will it be done!” Also, some developers feel like users don’t have the technical expertise to help solve software problems. Your uses are your greatest asset when it comes to gaining new insight about your application. It’s your responsibility to give them the language so they can articulate what they need. Continually ask questions, and make sure to validate that you’re understanding the comments accurately.
3. Don’t be afraid to get creative.
So many developers I talk to say things like “I can’t draw, I could never be a designer." While I’m not going to suggest everyone can be a designer, I still believe that everyone can flex their creative muscle. Just because you can’t paint a Mona Lisa, it shouldn’t prevent you from making basic sketches of your application’s workflow. Bottom line, if you can draw three basic shapes, you can sketch a thought or a design idea. Don’t be afraid to pick up a pencil or, better yet, hand one to your users to help them express their needs.
4. Have a purpose.
I liken the software development process to painting a room. Most of the work comes in the preparation. Clearing furniture, covering the floor, cleaning and taping off surfaces, all before you apply a single drop of paint. Building an application should have the same careful attention to planning. Don’t build features for technology’s sake or just because you can. Make sure each feature in your application has a purpose and is fulfilling a need. You should be able to adequately explain each feature and why it’s in your application.
5. When all else fails, reboot.
Sometimes an application’s design gets so far from its intended design that you find yourself forgetting what problem you were trying to solve in the first place. It can be a painful process to start over, but it can also be liberating to keep what’s working and throw away what’s not.
About the Author
Travis Lowdermilk has been developing custom software experiences for over 15 years in industries ranging from architecture, business, and health care. Currently, he works for a community hospital in central California. At the hospital, he creates line of business applications for clinical, financial, and performance improvement.
Predominantly using Microsoft frameworks, Travis creates solutions that employ a wide range of technologies such as: web, mobile, touch, and voice. Travis is a certified ASP.NET developer and has a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration – emphasizing in Information Systems. He’s currently enrolled in the Master’s program at DePaul University’s College of Digital Media. The focus of his study is Human-Computer Interaction and User-Centered Design.
Travis is the co-host of The Windows Developer Show – a weekly Internet broadcast for Microsoft developers, designers, and enthusiasts (www.windowsdevelopershow.com). To find out more about Travis, please visit: www.travislowdermilk.com or follow him on Twitter (@tlowdermilk).
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
A great primer and a helpful guide to explaining UCD to others
By M. Langenberg
This book is a great introduction to the overarching concepts of user-centered design. It's not particularly in depth, but the author, Travis Lowdermilk, provides a great resource for folks that are new to UCD or who, like myself, are looking for a quick reference to use a starting point for introducing team mates to the principles behind a user centered approach to application development. The book is a quick read at 108 pages with a very useful list of online resources and more in-depth publications to dive into if you're after more detail.
The chapters cover a brief bit of definition and then move into planning, building and testing applications. Each chapter has a great recap at the end covering the high-level points made.
I will definitely be sharing this book around my office. I lead the development team in a marketing agency and work with a team of user experience and visual designers. User-Centered Design will be a helpful tool for me in guiding my own teams approach to development, and will also help the broader digital team at my agency to articulate the benefits of a user-centered approach.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
By a developer for developers
By Devendra
By a developer for developers, the book is short, succinct, and can be read in a few short bouts of reading. Experienced developers will find that several user-centered design (UCD) practices have clearly been borrowed from, or absorbed into, classic software engineering practices.
Remainder of this review discusses the contents of each chapter.
Chapter 1 starts with "On January 9, 2007, a man quietly walked onto a stage and changed the course of technological history." That had me hooked.
Chapter 2 explains Usability, Human Computer Interaction (human factors), UCD, user experience, and how they relate to each other. It then goes on to explain UCD by describing what it isn't.
Chapter 3 is about working with users, knowing who your users are, understanding the different kinds of users, knowing when to listen to them, and when not to listen too literally.
Chapter 4 describes how to define a plan for your project. It starts with crafting a team mission statement. Project details are defined next with a title, description, stakeholders, and impact assessment. Importance of collecting user requirements without thinking about solutions follows next. That is followed by a discussion on collecting functional requirements, and how the application will solve the user requirements. The chapter proceeds with capturing data and workflow modeling, and ends with prototyping. Prototyping is also explained in greater detail in Chapter 8. Appendix A has a nice sample project template.
Chapter 5 starts with the importance of defining a manifesto or vision statement for an application. That is followed by a discussion on exercising restraint when adding features. The chapter delves into narrative, personas and scenarios, and their usage in the UCD process to refine the vision.
Chapter 6 delves into the need for creativity, and why it takes courage and hard work to exercise it. It discusses several ways for enhancing creativity, including studying how others do their work.
Chapter 7 delves into the study of design principles and their importance to UCD. It discusses the Principle of Proximity (Gestalt Principle), Visibility, Hierarchy, Mental Models and Metaphors, Progressive Disclosure, Consistency, Affordance and Constraints, Confirmation, Reaction Time (Hick's law), and Movement Time (Fitt's law).
Chapter 8 delves into gathering feedback for a new application using surveys, informal interviews, formal interviews, contextual inquiry, task analysis, heuristic evaluation, and A/B testing. Story boarding and prototyping as a means of visualizing the new application are also discussed in detail.
Chapter 9 discusses usability studies of existing applications as a means of gaining feedback. It details procedures and tools that may be used.
Every developer should read this book and absorb the practices described here, especially older developers who have been hearing about UCD but are not aware of its practices.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Solid survey of best practices
By Ben M
User-Centered Design by Travis Lowdermilk is a solid overview of the principles and practices of designing a software project with a focus on your users. The book does a good job of laying out the basic tools and processes of user-centered design, like usability studies, surveys, and project plans. It also argues convincingly for the power of its central points: user focus, preparation, and a structured process.
If you're looking for a deep dive into design theory, this is probably not a book you want. Rather than dig into abstract design issues, this book instead acts as a survey of the user-centered design landscape, and points you to resources to go deeper if a particular topic catches your interest. Lowdermilk also does a good job of pointing out examples of the different principles discussed, though for a stretch of the book he appears to be a bit fixated on a small selection of examples, particularly 53 Inc.'s popular iPad app Paper.
I'd recommend this book for developers who want to open their minds to design considerations and improve their ability to make usable products. It particularly seems suited for the engineer who knows technically how to implement features and write good code, but is still figuring out how to write applications that delight users. I'd especially recommend it for team leads or independent developers who are more likely to be able to meet users and be a part of managing requirements. I think all engineers could benefit from the books emphasis on the users point of view, but the real benefits will come to those who are able to make its suggestions part of the structure of their product workflows.
See all 6 customer reviews...
User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide to Building User-Friendly Applications, by Travis Lowdermilk PDF
User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide to Building User-Friendly Applications, by Travis Lowdermilk EPub
User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide to Building User-Friendly Applications, by Travis Lowdermilk Doc
User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide to Building User-Friendly Applications, by Travis Lowdermilk iBooks
User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide to Building User-Friendly Applications, by Travis Lowdermilk rtf
User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide to Building User-Friendly Applications, by Travis Lowdermilk Mobipocket
User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide to Building User-Friendly Applications, by Travis Lowdermilk Kindle
[D739.Ebook] PDF Download User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide to Building User-Friendly Applications, by Travis Lowdermilk Doc
[D739.Ebook] PDF Download User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide to Building User-Friendly Applications, by Travis Lowdermilk Doc
[D739.Ebook] PDF Download User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide to Building User-Friendly Applications, by Travis Lowdermilk Doc
[D739.Ebook] PDF Download User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide to Building User-Friendly Applications, by Travis Lowdermilk Doc
