Two Interaction Design books, “Evil by Design” by Chris Nodder and “Microinteractions” by Dan Saffer, have been sitting in my iBooks library for a while. I was deliberately waiting for a holiday, so I can read them in peace and without any distractions around. And, boy, was I glad I did so!
Service Design has been a field I wanted to dig in for a while. And the geek that I am, I was looking to a book to start… Well, apart from all the blog posts I read here and there. The book that Polaine, Løvlie and Reason wrote, indeed is a practical guide on how to start and march through this complex task of creating pleasant service design. In addition to the actionable advices there are many examples that put notions into perspective and create shared reference in the reader’s mind. And this certainly helps the newbie to start pondering on the topic.
This book is making constant references to the complexity of service interaction and the various touch points on different platforms/places. In the interconnected times we live in, it only makes sense to address design in a much more pervasive way than we used to a few years ago. Just going through the case studies presented in Service Design, one can get a few ideas on how to make the organization’s service offering better.
Recently, I have finished reading two books from the series “A Pocket Guide” by Five Simple Steps. One of them is “Psychology for Designers” by Joe Leech and the other one “The Craft of Words” by The Standartistas.
“Usable Usability” has a story and stories. It is a guide through experience in combination of shared reference, something that we (the readers) understand, but not necessarily made a mental note when we encountered the same situation.
This book is just as much about the digital world as it is about the offline one. It is a combination of both. And to be exact it is about their intersection – that thing that makes the user experience a fluid that flows between the 0 & 1 and the touch-and-feel aspects of our lives. It is about designing for a homogeneous experiences in a time that PCs get effectively replaced by mobile computing in the everyday life.
