Design for Real Life

You can’t always predict who will use your products, or what emotional state they’ll be in when they do. But by identifying stress cases and designing with compassion, you’ll create experiences that support more of your users, more of the time.

Join Sara Wachter-Boettcher and Eric Meyer as they turn examples from more than a dozen sites and services into a set of principles you can apply right now. Whether you’re a designer, developer, content strategist, or anyone who creates user experiences, you’ll gain the practical knowledge to test where your designs might fail (before you ship!), vet new features or interactions against more realistic scenarios, and build a business case for making decisions through a lens of kindness. You can’t know every user, but you can develop inclusive practices that support a wider range of people. This book will show you how.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Challenge Your Vision

Chapter 2 Make Space for Real People

Chapter 3 Incorporate Stress Cases

Chapter 4 Communicate Context and Intent

Chapter 5 Cultivate Compassion

Chapter 6 Learn from Users

Chapter 7 Humanize Your Process

Chapter 8 Make the Case

About the Authors

Eric A. Meyer started working on the web in late 1993. Since then, he’s been a college webmaster, one of the original CSS Samurai, a standards evangelist at Netscape, the author of many books and online resources, an occasional code artist, the technical lead at Rebecca’s Gift, and a cofounder of An Event Apart. He lives with his family in Cleveland.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher is an author, speaker, coach, strategist, and the founder of Active Voice, a company helping tech and design workers become radical, courageous leaders. In addition to Design for Real Life, she’s also the author of Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and other Threats of Toxic Tech and Content Everywhere. She has been published in The Washington Post, The Guardian, and McSweeney’s.