User-Centered Design

How do you design engaging applications that people love to use? This book demonstrates several ways to include valuable input from potential clients and customers throughout the process. With practical guidelines and insights from his own experience, author Travis Lowdermilk shows you how usability and user-centered design will dramatically change the way people interact with your application. Learn valuable strategies for conducting each stage of the design process—from interviewing likely users and discovering your application’s purpose to creating a rich user experience with sound design principles. User-Centered Design is invaluable no matter what platform you use or audience you target. * Explore usability and how it relates to user-centered design * Learn how to deal with users and their unique personalities * Clarify your application’s purpose, using a simple narrative to describe its use * Plan your project’s development with a software development life cycle * Be creative within the context of your user experience goals * Use visibility, consistency, and other design principles to enhance user experience * Collect valuable user feedback on your prototype with surveys, interviews, and usability studies

Travis Lowdermilk has been building software experiences as both a developer and a designer for over 15 years.Currently, Travis is a UX Designer at Microsoft, helping teams apply design thinking to their products.To learn more about Travis, visit: www.travislowdermilk.com

- Dedication - Preface - Chapter 1: Our World Has Changed - Chapter 2: What Is User-Centered Design? - Chapter 3: Working with Users - Chapter 4: Having a Plan - Chapter 5: Creating a Personal Manifesto - Chapter 6: Creativity and User Experience - Chapter 7: Design Principles - Chapter 8: Gathering Feedback - Chapter 9: Usability Studies - Chapter 10: You're Never Finished - Chapter 11: Other Resources - Sample Project Template - References - Colophon