I just finished reading Giles Colborne’s “Simple and Usable” – a delightfully compact, practical and highly readable book about interaction design. I’m glad the book isn’t one of those books that tries to solve everything about interaction design. Instead, it’s a book from a designer telling stories about his experiences solving design problems to someone who is interested in, but may not be an expert in the subject.

I did find the initial part of the book about design approaches a bit straightforward, mainly because it contained a lot of good design principles I had been hearing a lot elsewhere as well. However, I think it was a necessary in order to provide appropriate context for the four strategies for simplicity, which was the main focus of the book.

However, the main strengths of this book is the way it unfolds. Each page is provides a little story or lesson with a nice big photo next to it, and you’re not forced to dig too deep into theory or complex abstractions. The stories, when added up, provide a sort of perspective about design that’s actually quite holistic. And because each story was neatly fit into one page, it felt as though I was having a conversation of sorts, with the author narrating his experiences around this subject.

This is a really great way to explain design, because it’s not a hard science, but neither is it completely subjective. When I was fairly new to design, one of the hardest things to understand was how designers think and work. There are a ton of design books out there, many of them are either too technical, too sublime, too visionary, or a combination of the three. I still find that as a practicing designer now, we don’t talk enough about our experiences in doing design and fetishize outputs and ideas all too much.

It’s hard not to recommend this book to anyone. I really think it’s a very usable book, and it’ll be a staple on my bookshelf to remind myself of the little things that I need to consider when I think about my work.

Visual Thinking for Design (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies)

I was one of the lucky winners of this book from Morgan Kaufmann after I donated some money to the IxDA fundraising initiative. After turning in my MSc Project dissertation, I finally had some time to catch a breath. You’d think that reading a book on Visual Thinking would be the last thing on my mind after losing weeks of sleep to writing… I’m surprised myself.

Anyway, at a glance, this book is about understanding how we as humans interpret and interact with objects and environments visually. It’s written mostly from a psychologist’s perspective, and provides useful references to the theory and science of visual perception, cognition, attention, etc.

Colin starts off talking about how the eye and brain processes and perceives visual stimuli, and each chapter concludes with a set of design recommendations. He gradually works upwards the abstraction layer, dealing with topics like color and shapes, the relationship between visual and verbal processing, the process of “seeing” or “thinking” by sketching, leading up towards how we perceive meaning in a visual world.

I felt that I understood the subject matter a little better because I learned about cognitive science during the HCI course, so readers who are new to psychology may initially find it slightly alienating. I also feel that designers who are looking for design ideas may not find this book as an inspirational resource. I see this as reference material – something you pull out to make sure you’re doing things right, like getting more substantial evidence to support design ideas in problem solving.

It’s also a fairly easy book to read. Despite references to psychology terms like V1, V2 and top-down/bottom-up, the author succeeds in explaining things in simple language, and provides good examples of how the science of visual perception is linked to visual design.

The best parts of the book lie towards the end, and I think that the early chapters act as building blocks that support the overall perspective summarized in the last few chapters. The gist of it is that our mind, eye and body works together to look for patterns in the world, and that understanding how this takes place can aid designers in helping users to make sense of things more clearly and easily.

The implications on p. 172 are a key takeaway:

1. to support the pattern-finding capability of the brain; that is, to turn information structures into patterns
2. to optimize the cognitive process as a nested set of activities
3. to take the economics of cognition into account, considering the cost of learning new tools and ways of seeing
4. to think about attention at many levels and design for the cognitive thread.

(The word ‘cognition’ refers to the “process of thought”, i.e. thinking.)

In summary, this book is worth an investment. It’s one of those resources I will occasionally refer to for clear, evidence-based recommendations for visual design.