The story of digital design begins at the user interface (UI); the point of contact between the user and a digital product. This book will take you on a journey, designing UIs for 100 digital products on a range of platforms, including the desktop, televisions, web, mobile devices, and tablets.
It will be a progressive journey where you will see how digital design has evolved from command-line interfaces, to graphical-user interfaces (GUIs), to natural interfaces, to multitouch and organic user interfaces. Along the way, you will learn how technological advances, such as capacitive touchscreens, Bluetooth, artificial intelligence, and text to speech, has molded the UI in innovative ways and taken digital design to a completely new level. It’s a level where a designer must understand that the users and the context of the product dictate the design, and the success of a product is ultimately decided by user adoption.
Steve Jobs used to say, “Design is not what it looks like, design is how it works.” This book will rip open the look of digital applications and take you behind the scenes. You’ll discover how design works for 100 different digital applications, ranging from desktop software and widgets, to adaptive web interfaces, innovative mobiles apps, and games on tablets and televisions.
Using a practical approach to design principles, this book shows you how these principles can be applied to the latest digital products. You’ll be guided through critical considerations for designing interfaces by showing you the big-picture: outlining the design guidelines and best practices while showing real examples of how these design principles can be successfully applied. Designers will get practical advice on developing a rich UI for everyday ad-hoc applications and the help they need in their daily job, thanks to these practical and invaluable examples, illustrations, and case studies.