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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.7
EAN num: 9780321535085
ISBN number: 0321535081
Label: New Riders Press
Manufacturer: New Riders Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 256
Printing Date: April 18, 2008
Publishing house: New Riders Press
Sale Popularity Level: 84793
Studio: New Riders Press
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
The trick to great design is knowing how to think through each decision so that users don't have to. In Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action, Robert Hoekman, Jr., author of Designing the Obvious, presents over 30 stories that illustrate how to put good design principles to work on real-world web application interfaces to make them obvious and compelling. From the very first impression to the last, Hoekman takes a think out loud approach to interface design to show us how to look critically at design decisions to ensure that human beings, the kind that make mistakes and do things we don't expect, can walk away from our software feeling productive, respected, and smart.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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Promising book with a great selection of topics and a lot of nice examples. The book is also quite readable, though the down-to-earth writing style sometimes gets out of hand. Most of the presented solutions are good, but some perhaps less so: For someone who claims he wants to "leave nothing to chance", it's disappointing that he rarely bothers to back his statements up with more than "I'm in the camp who believes". This may be fine if you are a Zen master or are designing your personal blog, but I'd have appreciated some mention of existing usability studies where relevant, and some discusion on how to evaluate your own design decisions.
Rated by buyers 
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This is a follow on book by the author of the popular Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design. The author is a web designer who has started his own company. His advice seems to me to be very practical and valuable.
He starts with some basics on layout and design continuity to form a more positive impression. He presents some advice on what to do and not to do when it comes to web site navigation. He talks about content patterns such as trigger words, making the text easy to scan, and labeling. He weighs in with his seasoned opinions on such popular GUI innovations as tag clouds, auto-completion, streaming video, advanced search criteria, paging through search results, syndication, and predictive market style rating systems.
He also gives advice on mitigating goal conversion problems such as detailed form entry abandonment and resistance to registration.
I get the feeling that he has a pet peeve about sites that make it easy to register yet hard to unregister as he devotes a whole chapter on letting them go.
Rated by buyers 
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I recommend this book and Designing the Obvious to web designers, and burgeoning IA's . These two books combined take seemingly daunting but painfully simple interfaces and functionality and turn them into easy cheezy solutions that are plug-n-play ready to go! No matter what type of website you are working on, these core pieces allow you to embrace to basic in order to excel in the complex. Such a breeze to read, and fun too! Robert, you're amazing. If I could ever work with you, it would be a dream come true! Thank you for all the time and energy you put into these books to help make the rest of our jobs much easier!
Rated by buyers -
There are many useful concepts illustrated in this book, including:
* Gutenberg diagram-Primary optical area and terminal anchor
* Ambient signifiers by Ross Howard - color, size, transparency level
* The goal to create positive moments, with a great example of the use of autocomplete
* Video!
* Display validation pre-submit, aka check boxes which activate subsequent to a validated form as the user tabs through the interface
* Many other nuanced goodies
One of the greatest compliments is that this book doesn't go far enough, yet its core message is to go further than we have gone, hence it is a book on the path...
Some criticisms
* Talks smack about former client
* Doesn't go far enough in reducing instruction text
* In showing character count in Twitter, does not indicate a "going over limit" could be handled
* Use of the phrase (e.g., me@mydomain.com) after an attendee email form field label-do we really have people who don't know what an email address looks like? And if so, are they really going to learn it on this website?
* Repetitive use of text, e.g., attendee very first name, attendee last name, attendee email
* Heavy use of drop-downs
* Wants to (needlessly) coin the term protocast, for a screencast used for a demo/walkthrough
* Inconsistency in handling question marks as helper links in an interface (uses both ? and what's this? instead of simply ?
But these complaints are largely trying to hold the book to the standard it is trying to create for the interface designer. In other words, any of its detractions and failures are largely seen as indicators of its sucess in making us think more deeply about what it means to design for the moment.
Thank you sir.
Rated by buyers -
Hoekmann's last book Designing the Obvious was pretty good: a short, readable survey of some user experience tactics and tips. Nearly all of it was applicable and relevant.
This book (published, what, a year later?) seems hurried and much more superficial. It's really just a collection of short essays that run the gamut from mildly useful to simply wrong. Unfortunately, Hoekman's decided that *none* of his user interface design advice needs support from research, usability, or even real-world implementations. It's the level of opinionated but poorly-backed up writing you'd expect from a weblog. What products or sites are these techniques used on, and how have they affected user behavior? Hoekman's central argument is that "the details matter", that the smallest aspect of a user experience is worth agonizing over. Is that true? It seems like it ought to be, but tinkering with the nuances of interactions seems like the *most* critical time to be able to measure improvements. Unfortunately, there's nothing here that really convinces me that a given idea is good, only short exercises often without any context.
Finally, Hoekman's writing style is exactly what you'd get on a weblog: overly informal, full of sentence fragments and inelegant constructions. NewRiders has shown a worsening trend to publish books that seem awfully lightly edited, to put it kindly.
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