Joy of UX, The: User Experience and Interactive Design for Developers

by David Platt

“For years now, I’ve been running around preaching to anyone who’ll listen that UX is something that everybody (not just UX people) needs to be doing. Dave has done an excellent job of explaining what developers need to know about UX, in a complete but compact, easy-to-absorb, and implementable form. Developers, come and get it!”

—Steve Krug, author of Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability



Master User Experience and Interaction Design from the Developer’s Perspective



For modern developers, UX expertise is Without outstanding user experience, your software will fail. Now, David Platt has written the first and only comprehensive developer’s guide to achieving a world-class user experience.



Quality user experience isn’t hard, but it does require developers to think in new ways. The Joy of UX shows you how, with plenty of concrete examples. Firmly grounded in reality, this guide will help you optimize usability and engagement while also coping with difficult technical, schedule, and budget constraints.



Platt’s technology-agnostic approach illuminates all the principles, techniques, and best practices you need to build great user experiences for the web, mobile devices, and desktop environments. He covers the entire process, from user personas and stories through wireframes, layouts, and execution. He also addresses key issues—such as telemetry and security—that many other UX guides ignore. You’ll find all the resources and artifacts you complete case studies, sample design documents, testing plans, and more.



This guide shows you how to



Recognize and avoid pitfalls that lead to poor user experiences Learn the crucial difference between design and mere decoration Put yourself in your users’ shoes—understand what they want (and where, when, and why) Quickly sketch and prototype user interfaces for easy refinement Test your sketches on real users or appropriate surrogates Integrate telemetry to capture the best possible usage information Use analytics to accurately interpret the data you’ve captured Solve unique experience problems presented by mobile environments Secure your app without compromising usability any more than necessary “Polish” your UX to eliminate user effort everywhere you can

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Genres: Design, Nonfiction

393 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2016

About the author

DAVID PLATT serves as Lead Pastor at McLean Bible Church in Washington, D.C. He is the founder and chairman of Radical (Inc.), an international ministry that serves the church for the cause of Christ—to glorify God by making disciples and multiplying churches among all nations. Resources from David Platt and Radical can be found at radical.net.

Books by David Platt include Radical, Radical Together, Follow Me, Counter Culture, and Something Needs to Change, as well as the following volumes in the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series: Exalting Jesus in Matthew, Exalting Jesus in James, Exalting Jesus in 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus, and Exalting Jesus in Galatians.

David Platt received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Along with his wife and four children, he lives in the Washington D.C. metro area.

Connect with David on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Reviews

[Jevgenij · Rating 1 out of 5]

Perhaps the reason for the low rating is that the book was not what I expected in any way. Instead of talking about good UX and precise rules/examples, the book is mostly focused on the process. And the process that is described in the book is pretty bad, in my view. E.g. I feel that personas are useless in most cases, and spending _a day_ (like the book recommends) on making them is just a waste of time.

If you have words "for developers" in a title, please make the book logical and exact.

[Chuck Kollars · Rating 5 out of 5]

Basically "common sense" applied to computer-user interfaces. Specialist techniques that can be used by the coders themselves so no UI specialist is needed.

Quite a few specifics, but if you boil it all down to just one thing, it would be: count the number of mouse clicks to do each of the most common things, and demand _very_ small numbers in every case.

[Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This introduced me to the subject of Ux. I will be going a bit deeper into this; there is much I do not know about UX; the field has evolved quite rapidly.