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Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

Designer here as well, similarly frustrated with the lack of analytical rigor in the discipline.

Cadence & Slang did not impress me. I read it a few years ago now so I can’t quote exact examples, but at the time it felt like more fluff to be honest. Well written fluff, but still fluff (ie will design students in 20 years, or even now, benefit from reading it like they would a classic such as “Grid systems for visual design”? My money is on no). Would be curious to hear what aspects of it you particularly enjoyed.

Sadly enough, I find that the best books on designing for interactive media are from the 80s/90s. Examples include Raskin’s “The Humane Interface”, Togazzini’s compendiums, etc.

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I do design research. My papers always provide principles with examples and evidence. They are generally very specific though (unlike this article). I agree that it is rare outside of the research community to find evidence (the why) and implementation details (the how) though.

An example paper of mine: Toward Principles for the Design of Navigation Affordances in Code Editors: An Empirical Investigation http://dl.acm.org/authorize?N37917

Where is the best place/s to find design research?

There are a few human-computer interaction conference proceedings that I would recommend.

CHI is the biggest and most prestigious, but also most general. It will include a lot of irrelevant papers too. UIST is smaller and focuses on novel interactions. CSCW is about collaboration. IUI is about intelligent user interfaces. VLHCC publishes work on developer tools from a human perspective.

The easiest way to find these papers is through scholar.google.com. Just search for what topic you want, and it will try to find relevant research papers.

CHI, UIST, CSCW, and TEI are my personal favorite academic conferences for interactive media related design. (The paper posted by GP was published at CHI)

>I do design research. My papers always provide principles with examples and evidence.

From what I remember of studying Human Computer Interaction (HCI) as an undergrad in the 90s, the evidence was derived from learnability studies. This meant that research favoured point and click interfaces (which are the equivalent of caveperson grunting, IMO) over command line interfaces which allow much deeper expressivity. There was basically no affordance to systems that people use day-in day-out and are happy with the trade offs in the learning curve (vi, emacs, blender, lighting desks, audio controllers, Bloomberg terminal).

I like that your example paper is about trying out different interactions in a small part of a daily-driver piece of software. But it's still trying a 'new' thing for some of the experimental users which means learnability is core. How do you manage the balance?

Hadn't heard of The Humane Interface, I'll have to check it out :)

Re: C&C, a couple of things (just picking from my highlights).

Chapter 2 - Consistency & Character

This informed my own work quite a bit. Especially notes about how consistency aids clarity in the product. Also nice "hmm, now there's an idea" type of stuff like "a designer creates an architecture of information within the mind of the recipient of his work." This triggered a bit of a waterfall, leading to stuff like reading Christopher Alexander's _Notes on the Synthesis of Form_.

Also from this chapter is the point about how having a consistent behavioral language. Meaning, if two elements perform similar tasks, they should look similar to one another.

Lots of great little beats like this that have wedged themselves into my thinking.

Chapter 3 - Simplicity

The one about only forcing a user to create an account when it provides value really informed my ability to design solid onboarding experiences. Taught me to build gradually invasive products that speak to the user like you would a new acquaintance. Over time, you slowly get comfortable asking them for more and more (e.g., use things like local storage to persist data temporarily to give the feel of hitting a DB).

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Man, is there a place to talk about stuff like this? You got my hamsters spinning.

Grid Systems for Visual Design is on my list. I have Design Elements on there too.

Are there any other books you recommend?

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