UX Magic

by Daniel Rosenberg

It takes conviction to title a user experience book that stands solidly on a cognitive science foundation as “Magic” but through the practice of the Semantic Interaction Design method this breakthrough book introduces, you will appear to many as possessing superhero UX powers. The Semantic IxD method is laser focused on transforming product requirements into experiences guaranteed to result in the minimum cognitive load with the smallest number of screens and fewest flow steps possible. An additional benefit it provides is a 10X speed increase at which designers can achieve these magical results. It provides an antidote to the expensive and endless A/B trials resulting in suboptimal products propagated by the proponents of design Darwinism. It can also mitigate the excessive hours wasted in opinion and personality oriented UX debates during product development meetings. UX Magic builds upon an HCI conceptual model foundation leveraging human natural language understanding and extends it into the GUI layers of design pattern visualization, UX flow and applied game theory to create optimal user experiences that also align well with business objectives. In addition to guiding you to minimize cognitive load from the very start of sketching screens it will also lead to UX designs that scale well into the future as product functionality grows with each successive release.

Genres: Design

500 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 9, 2020

Reviews

[Natalía Papadopoúlou · Rating 3 out of 5]

Had high hopes on this book as an educator and interaction designer. In all fairness it’s quite dense and is referencing so many resources that it might take a while to go through it (needless to say you can practice as much you want along reading it). However I felt I was often struggling to guess what was on the author’s mind, or even more how did this process was shaped up by students’ experience on this course, so ultimately the experience of reading this was not optimal. I was under the impression that a lot of the chosen terms are not used in the industry anymore in the way that are used in this book (who uses the term as a design pattern category?). I’ve also felt the supporting design cases were badly designed / illustrated. The type of interaction needed for this to be a useful educational resource for students made me think this was not meant to be a book at all 😞

[Shivanand · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like the concept of Object-based design. Generally, websites are designed by features. This book recommends identifying objects and actions performed on them. I highly recomend.

[Kyle Batson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This will be my design bible going forward. Daniel lays out the connective tissue between requirements definition and ideation that I have always felt missing in most design processes. Conceptual modeling has already helped a colleague simplify and refine their user tasks on a project, leading to an improved user experience. Highly recommended.

[Maryann Bell]

This book was full of information but hard to get through and a little disorganized. We read it for a book club I’m a part of and we had many valuable takeaways but agreed it may be best suited for designers at the beginning of their careers rather than experienced professionals.

[Taylor Fredrickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let's start with the good: There is a lot of good info here, especially the processes of defining grammar to distill down what is necessary and reduce cognitive load. This is really helpful to make UX more refined and functional.

The bad: Well let's just say it's good this book isn't a UX. It is extremely dense, tedious, full of jargon which is often outdated and that I haven't heard anywhere else. Rosenberg should have hired a ghostwriter because the writing and organization is terrible

Honestly, I hate reading this book. Good info if you can mine the nuggets but it is such a sterile, poorly written slog to read and my eyes glaze over after 10 minutes.