125 Ways to Enhance Usability - Make Better Design Decisions

Aunque lo compré con el contenido en inglés, está muy bien organizado y ordenado por temática. Muy bien indexado. Cada ley viene con una detallada explicación y gráficamente bien sustentado. Sin rellenos innecesarios. Lo recomiendo al 100%.

Great book to help remind a person of design choices. Well put together and decent examples. Wish they would update a couple of items, but it is a must have for a reference source to generate new ideas.

Very readable, interesting, and well designed book. You'll find yourself flipping through the pages without stopping (just one more page!).

That said, I was a bit disappointed on two accounts.
One- The breadth of topics is great, but the book is a dictionary not a text-book. Each topic is covered in short from a very high theoretical level. Each topic gets two pages, a description page and an example page. Frequently there only few really substantial sentences for the description, and the examples can be a bit contrived. You turn the page wishing there was some more substance.

Second- The practical use of the book is limited. Since the book is trying to target ALL cross-disciplinary design it sometimes loses focus and relevance from any designer. A lot of interesting psychological principles are brought in the book which arguably have any relevance to design.

In short- interesting and well designed but leaves you wanting more.

This book does indeed present 125 universal principles of design, along with a brief discussion of why it's universal and a reference to the principle's origin. Nothing indepth here, but what a great compendium.

A UX colleague of mine initially recommended this book to me, and I started leafing through it. And when I looked up again, I had read half of the 125 snippets that make up this book...

This is the strength of this book - instead of taking one theory and squeezing 300 pages out of it (as so many other design and UX books do), it deliberately dedicates exactly 2 pages for each theory. The left side of this bigger-than-A4 book is dedicated towards theory, with very handy references of where one can find out more about the theory, while the right side has good visual examples of how this theory maps out in the real world.

For a seasoned professional, many of the theories will be well-known, but I was still surprised by the often clever cross-referencing to other pieces of research that made me think anew about the theory. Also, the authors made a fantastic effort in boiling down often very wordy theories into a few very concise paragraphs.

I also really liked the mix of theories: there is a lot of design, a lot of psychology, evolutionary biology, Gestalt and other research on perception, motivators, and many other things... this is a strength of this book because everybody who reads it will find something new from a related discipline, and the book makes it obvious why this is still relevant.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, also because it's easy to just pick it up, read a couple of theories and put it back down. I recommend it very much for people who always wondered what some of the names of the theories were that they were using on a daily basis, but also for students of design and UX who want to "cheat" and get really handy quick explanations of complicated subject matters without having to fight their way through the often tedious books of these areas.

This book was required for a college class. The best I can describe it is like it's a lean and thin slice of steak—no fat, and not that much steak.

You get a chapter by chapter checklist of design principles. Some you most likely already know, a lot you didn't. Each topic doesn't extend past a few pages. Within each chapter there are several real life examples of each design principle so you can understand what they are talking about.

All in all, I was craving more, but this book was more than a sufficient meal. The price is in line with the content you would receive so it does its job with nothing more and nothing less. Recommended.

This book is basically a glossary of various principles of design. On one page, there's a title and a page (4+ paragraphs or so) with suggested readings, while the opposite facing page has a visual representation or example of the concept. So, for example, for "Flexibility-usability tradeoff", the visual representation on the facing page shows various remotes along the flexibility - usability spectrum.

While this book is a good reference, so for example if you want to know more about a specific concept, I wouldn't say that it was an easy thing to pick and and read front to back. Concepts are organized alphabetically, instead of some other method, which makes for easy searching but does not gel together when reading straight through. To the authors' credit, the beginning of the book suggests which principles you should look at for the following categories:

1. How can Influence the way a design is perceived?
2. How can I help people learn from a design?
3. How can I enhance the usability of a design?
4. How can I increase the appeal of a design?
5. How can I make better design decisions?

Personally, however, I feel like the descriptions are one step away from application. So they explain what a concept is and how to recognize it, but don't so much talk about how to apply or how to use the principles to your own work.

The bottom line: A great reference, but if looking for something more directly applicable, look elsewhere.

As a developer, I often under appreciated design. This book is so broad, that it really forces you to accept that design IS everywhere. It also helps with the terminology used by designers and arms you with the names many design elements. It really makes you think of everything a little differently, such as the closure used in the the store logo.

On the other hand, it is rather light on detail and application... I over came this by taking notes and forcing my self to think about "how could this principle be applied to web design" I was always successful at finding at least one way. Which in it's self is a design principle "Depth of processing," helps you remember things better.

This is a really interesting and informative book. I keep it close and look into it often. In some respects, it reinforces what we already know. For example, the authors define "error" as "an action or omission of action yielding an unintended result." They then make an argument for usability, because although "Many accidents are caused by human error . . ." the underlying cause is a result of design flaws. while I agree with this, it seems to be disconnected from the overall topic of "errors." In contrast, on some pages, their information is interesting and useful. In "Expectation Effect," they explain how to use design and/or persuasion in conjunction with expectation. Something I had not considered, and expect to use in the future.

Each topic follows alphabetically, and in most cases, each topic is a two-page spread.

Content is highly accessible, and backed up by suggested readings.

This is not a "how to" book. It is a book you might browse through over time. Maybe it rests beside your favorite chair, and you thumb through it as you relax. I think it is important, however. I think that if someone internalizes the many ideas the authors present, he or she will be greatly enhanced as a designer.

This book is probably intended for graphic designers, Ux specialists and others that deal with humans and visual interactions, but as a software developer I have also found this book to be a welcome addition to my book collection. Not every principle introduced in the book is necessarily applicable to software design (for example, the waist-to-hip ratio, uncanny valley, face-ism ration, etc.) There are still many other principles that are relevant to software development (depth of processing, iteration, most advanced yet acceptable, priming, not invented here, etc.)

It is worth noting this book is not a replacement for software development books. If you are a software designer, engineer, information architect or similar looking to expand your insights, this book is worth reading.

125 principles well explained and completely independent from each other. That`s why yo can read at any page at any time and get a new insight of the principle described and exemplified. And still, you don't have a completely isolated chunk of information, because ant the end of each entry, the authors shows you a list of other principles related to the one being readed. Maybe I would accomodate the principles in other way instead of making it in an alphabetical order. I gess a related disciplines order would be a better idea, and hence, for example you could be able to locate all principles related to a given disciline in a single chapter, making specific chapters for architectural principles, gestalt principles and so on.

It's easy for design to get overwhelming- or maybe that's just me, but, in any event, this book is a fantastic resource to page through when you have what I think of as the opposite of designer's block. With so many innovations in programming, UX, design and information architecture coming out all of the time it's easy to lose a sense of how to make things just "feel right." This book is a great way to get back to the basics of semiotics and rediscover what intuitive, and usable really mean.

I agree that alphabetical may not be the best way to organize this kind of information-- if that's a deal-breaker for you check out 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter); but, given the illustrations and the physical structure of the book it's easy enough to breeze through and find those things you didn't even realize you were looking for. This makes a great short-hand companion to many of the principles described more extensively in The Design of Everyday Things, and, in my opinion, could even be a great coffee-table read...

This book is fantastic...It is designer's intuition put into words.
Whether it is colors, aesthetic, convergence, defensible space, constancy, chunking, rule of thirds, the list goes on... as a designer, I know intuitively part of what is detailed in this book, but I do not necessarily have all the data backing it up or know all the reasons why I design the way I do. This book explained it to me in a concise manner...one topic per fold (description on the first page,visualization on the second). Even better it allows me to explain these very concepts to my clients or vendors.
As a professional in the exhibit world I find this book extremely educational and no doubt it will be a wealth of information for a student of design.
I give it 5 stars indeed.

fw

I loved this book. It employs an attractive format with facing pages; explanation on the left and example on the right. The writing is clear and makes sometimes complex topics accessible. The text also does a good job at integrating topics from different disciplines. Great addition to your library.

Universal Principles of Design is far and away the best and most inspiring (and inspired) book on my shelf. I return to it again and again. I buy it for friends, business associates, employees, and students. The voice, the layout, the graphics, and the functional design of the book itself are exemplars of design excellence. I just ordered the updated edition, but have bought numerous copies of the first edition.
This book contains crisp definitions of the key principles of design - designing anything from an object to an experience and everything in between. Don't wait - hit that purchase button. Get 2, you'll want to give one to someone!
M. Brian Jones

This book is an excellent resource for visual and interaction design concepts at the psychological level. Every professional in the field of UX Design should both have a copy and read it from cover to cover. It will be of tremendous help to you both when defining solutions and talking to them.