User-Centered Design: A Developer's Guide to Building User-Friendly Applications

Travis Lowdermilk

Mar 2013 · "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

About this ebook

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

Ratings and reviews

This book is an easy read. It goes over the basic things that you would need to think about when dealing with UCD. The subject is very interesting and the author brings up good points to consider. Overall, I'm glad I bought this book.

About the author

Travis Lowdermilk has been developing custom software experiences for over 15 years in industries ranging from architecture, business, and health care. Currently, he works for a community hospital in central California. At the hospital, he creates line of business applications for clinical, financial, and performance improvement. Predominantly using Microsoft frameworks, Travis creates solutions that employ a wide range of technologies such as: web, mobile, touch, and voice. Travis is a certified ASP.NET developer and has a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration – emphasizing in Information Systems. He’s currently enrolled in the Master’s program at DePaul University’s College of Digital Media. The focus of his study is Human-Computer Interaction and User-Centered Design. Travis is the co-host of The Windows Developer Show – a weekly Internet broadcast for Microsoft developers, designers, and enthusiasts (www.windowsdevelopershow.com). To find out more about Travis, please visit: www.travislowdermilk.com or follow him on Twitter (@tlowdermilk).