Architects are expected to have a handle on civil, material, and mechanical engineering, landscape architecture, building contracting and city codes, aesthetics, interior design, manipulating light, home energy consumption, and how people engage with buildings and each other.
Interface designers require a similarly broad spectrum of skills from typography to layout and graphic design to interaction design to storytelling.
The Design Axioms describe the minimal rule set for designing interfaces: the 16 foundational concepts that are required knowledge for engineers and designers to create usable and elegant interfaces.
The design of the content (and book) will follow the same tenets outlined within it. Diagrams, screenshots, and pictures (the visual story) dominate the content; text-based descriptions are short and to the point.
Why do we need this?
We’re all designers. We all make conscious and unconscious design decisions every day from the act of walking to lunch, creating a task list, or writing a technical review. Some of us are paid to design in disciplines that require planning the underlying purpose of products or planning the working of something before it is built.
This is a re-education for designers. For 15 years, a production stratification has evolved into stove-piped disciplines from information architecture to user experience to interaction design to usability to graphic design much to the detriment of designers. Emerging from this new discipline of 30 years is the Renaissance interface designer: a technically savvy artist that’s fluent in the fundamentals of good typography, color theory and its application, composition, layout, usability, scripting, and interaction design.
People will tolerate a lot when a service is cheap or free. Do not confuse what people put up with as a measure of what constitutes something that is well designed. Products thrive (or wither) based on the users’ experience from the service company’s reputation to the sale to packaging to visual design to how the software feels to training and help. Users become product apostles when the service experience exceeds their expectations and rocks their world. They spread the word through their social network and drive friends and family to take the service for a spin. Ka-ching.
Great user interface design is critical to produce elegant design solutions that spark people’s interest... and keep them buying into and recommending a service.