We're all cyborgs. It's true! We use technology every day in all aspects of our lives—but that's not a bad thing! The problem is when we let it take over our lives. This book will help kids and grownups alike reflect on their relationship with technology and learn to embrace the benefits of being unplugged.

Sound can profoundly impact how people interact with your product. Well-designed sounds can be exceptionally effective in conveying subtle distinctions, emotion, urgency, and information without adding visual clutter. In this practical guide, Amber Case and Aaron Day explain why sound design is critical to the success of products, environments, and experiences.Just as visual designers have a set of benchmarks and a design language to guide their work, this book provides a toolkit f...

We're all cyborgs. It's true! We use technology every day in all aspects of our lives-but that's not a bad thing! The problem is when we let it take over our lives. This book will help kids and grownups alike reflect on their relationship with technology and learn to embrace the benefits of being unplugged.Core themes in this book:Balance, Feelings, Life, TimeMeet A Kids Co., a new ...

How can you design technology that becomes a part of a user’s life and not a distraction from it? This practical book explores the concept of calm technology, a method for smoothly capturing a user’s attention only when necessary, while calmly remaining in the background most of the time. You’ll learn how to design products that work well, launch well, are easy to support, easy to use, and remain unobtrusive.Author Amber Case presents ideas first introduced by researchers at Xerox ...

Best of TOC is a collection of essential posts from the last 12 months, selected from the TOC blog and a number of external sources.One of the mantras at Tools of Change is "fail forward fast," which is an alliterative way of encouraging experimentation. That's why we felt it appropriate to use Best of TOC as a testing ground for a "Web-to-book" process. As we hoped, experimentation led to lessons we wouldn't have learned otherwise.The material in Best...

"A marvelous job of exploring first hand the implications of storing our entire lives digitally."-Guy L. Tribble, Apple, Inc.Tech luminary, Gordon Bell, and Jim Gemmell unveil a guide to the next digital revolution. Our daily life started becoming digital a decade ago. Now much of what we do is digitally recorded and accessible. This trend won't stop. And the benefits are astonishing.Based on their own research Bell and Gemmell explain the ever- incr...

Building products and services that people interact with is the big challenge of the 21st century. Dan Saffer has done an amazing job synthesizing the chaos into an understandable, ordered reference that is a bookshelf must-have for anyone thinking of creating new designs.”— Jared Spool, CEO of User Interface EngineeringInteraction design is all around us. If you’ve ever wondered why your mobile phone looks pretty but doesn’t work well, you’ve confronted bad interaction desi...

Web 2.0, the second generation of the World Wide Web, allows us to connect, create, collaborate, and share information. When we bring Web 2.0 tools into the classroom, we transform learning. By applying these tools thoughtfully, we see a shift in student engagement, creativity, and higher order learning skills. In this companion book, the authors of the best-selling Web 2.0: New Tools, New Schools introduce you to more Web 2.0 tools and expertly lead you through classroom and professional ...

Explore the new design discipline that is behind such products as the iPod and innovative Web sites like Flickr. While other books on this subject are either aimed at more seasoned practitioners or else are too focused on a particular medium like software, this guide will take a more holistic approach to the discipline, looking at interaction design for the Web, software, and devices. It is the only interaction design book that is coming from a designers point of view rather than that of a...

Whether you're creating a game or a website, a lasting bond with users is more often than not the result of emotional attachment. Knowing the ins and outs of emotional design will enable you to imbue your creation with personality and to shape the user's perception. Find out how to integrate emotional appeal into your website, and how to turn your game into more than a cold, flawless, technical challenge. A personal touch can make all the difference, if you know how to design it. ...

Web designers are no longer just web designers. To create a successful web product that’s as large as Etsy, Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest–or even as small as a tiny app–you need to know more than just HTML and CSS. You need to understand how to create meaningful online experiences so that users want to come back again and again.In other words, you have to stop thinking like a web designer or a visual designer or a UX designer or an interaction designer and start thinking like a p...

Even the most thought-out and best-planned user experience can get lost when attention to certain details falls short. To raise awareness for those little things that add up to an ideal user experience, we have put together "Designing Better UX". The practical approaches for designing better UX cover mobile apps, adaptive systems, and multi-screen experiences. The eBook is packed with in-depth tips and tricks shared by experts from the industry. They cons...