Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action (Voices That Matter) | 
 enlarge | Author: Robert Hoekman Jr.
Publisher: New Riders Press
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $22.87
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Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 30933
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 0.4
ISBN: 0321535081
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.7
EAN: 9780321535085
ASIN: 0321535081
Publication Date: April 18, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new book. Shipped from our NYC store. Slight Shelf wear to cover. Pages are clean and unmarked.
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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 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 Desiging the Moment makes my job 100% easier! October 3, 2008
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!
 Good insight, doesn't go far enough August 26, 2008
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 next 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 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 success in making us think more deeply about what it means to design for the moment.
Thank you sir.
 Needs some weight August 5, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
Few good ideas for a few specific web design topics July 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was really expecting something out of this title after reading the previous Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design but the book turned out to be a little disappointment. It contains 31 short chapters that put the principles of the previous book in to use. Some of the topics discussed like signing in, forms and so on can give you a few really nice ideas to be used in a project.
The point is that these few topics could have been published as online articles as they hardly have enough to say to put together a whole book. If the book would've been published a couple of years ago the "not so interesting" topics could have also been worth printing. The language is easy and really fast to read so you can quickly skim the book through and then concentrate on the interesting topics with more thought.
This title clearly falls in to the box of average things...
Great stories on how to improve the user experience July 12, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Robert Hoekman Jr. second book, Designing the Moment, focuses on improving the online user experience. His approach is a practical one: design interfaces that respect users and allow them to feel in control.
Robert's goal is to inspire the web professional to "improve the moment" for users. His storytelling method of explaining strategies makes the 220 page book a quick and fun read. The book contains 30 stories, based on his own experiences of real-world applications and the step-by-step approach taken toward resolving design interaction issues.
The stories are concise, and offer a critique of each phase as changes are made to interfaces. Robert has a "think out loud" method which allows the reader to better understand the decision making process. Question steps along the way and don't hesitate to make decisions you might change in the future. Designing interfaces is an iterative process.
Designing the Moment assumes the reader has knowledge of web design and development; it does not provide the specific code to implement the recommendations. As Robert mentions in the book, "This book is meant as a conversation starter. It's meant to get you thinking".
The book is divided into seven parts:
Part 1: Getting Oriented - give a good first impression to the user
Part 2: Learning - make it easier for users to find their way around
Part 3: Searching - improve the search interface
Part 4: Diving In - great tips on improving forms and video controls
Part 5: Participating - focus on social media
Part 6: Managing Information - how to manage lots of information
Part 7: Moving On - the sign out process
My favorite story in the book is in Chapter 7, where Robert discusses the simplicity of clear labels. Make it easy for users to to use applications. Provide users with simple, easy to understand labels and instructions. On forms or applications, rather than displaying an error message that the user didn't enter information in a valid format, add informative text on the form or application form field that describes what is acceptable.
Designing the Moment is a wonderful resource for information architects, usability experts, interaction designers and developers. I highly recommend it!
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