Community: Sample Chapters

This is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of Jessica Enders’s new book Designing UX: Forms. 2016 SitePoint.

Chapter 5: Flow

Paper forms are static. Immobile, unresponsive, fixed. Forms come alive when they’re on the Web: questions can appear or hide, errors can be flagged and corrected, and the experience can be tailored to users and their needs.

In this chapter, we’ll see how to best design all these user interactions and more. Because we want the total user experience to feel smooth and painless—like gliding down a river—we’ll call this aspect of form design flow. Read More

This is an sample chapter from Josh Clark’s book Designing for Touch. 2015, A Book Apart.

Chapter 4: Gestures

Hands are wonderfully expressive. We talk with our hands all the time: they ask questions, show intent, command attention, reveal emotion. A backhanded wave dismisses an idea; a jab of the finger accuses; a thumbs-up enthuses. If hands are excellent at communicating with people, they’re even more effective at communicating with objects. From the delicate operation of tying a shoelace to the blunt-force strength of opening a pickle jar, our hands and fingers constantly improvise in grip, pressure, position, and sensitivity.

How can we bring similar expression to manipulating digital information? Touchscreens put data literally in the user’s hands, and it’s the designer’s job to enable and interpret that interaction. Unfortunately, while our hands have a robust vocabulary for speaking to people and objects, we’re still in the grammar-school stages of a gestural language for touchscreens. A richer lexicon lies ahead, but it will take time for a more sophisticated range of touchscreen gestures to become common knowledge. Read More

This is a sample chapter from the 3rd edition of Designing with the Mind in Mind, by Jeff Johnson. 2020 Morgan Kaufmann.

Chapter 15: We Make Errors

People make mistakes and commit errors; it’s a fact of life. Nobody is perfect. Designers of digital technology have to live with that fact. Actually, good designers do more than live with it; their designs take it into account. They avoid designs that make it likely for users to make errors (Norman, 2014). They create digital products and services that help people avoid and recover from errors.

Mistakes Versus Slips

When categorizing the types of errors people make, the first distinction is between mistakes and slips (Norman, 1983a; Reeves, 2010). Read More