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

Table of Contents

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

Appendix A. Sample Project Template

Appendix B. References

About the Author

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