Favorite design books (Irene Au - Google Head of UX)

http://bagcheck.com/bag/5571-favorite-design-books

by thibaut_barrere • 15 years ago

97 14 15 years ago

bagcheck.com

naner• 15 years ago

How to Choose the Perfect Blue by HAL 9000

rudiger• 15 years ago

http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

mceachen• 15 years ago

Nice! For the TL;DR crowd, it's an article from Google's first visual designer, grousing about the Google culture of testing "41 shades of blue" and arguing if 3, 4, or 5 pixels are proper border widths. Note also that the article conspicuously capitalizes the word Design.

keiferski• 15 years ago

Also useful (but not mentioned): Universal Principles of Design.

juddlyon• 15 years ago

Great recommendation. If I could only choose one, it would be this.

tastybites• 15 years ago

I wish my last name were the chemical symbol for a precious metal.

jfeldstein2• 15 years ago

I'm not sure what Au may or may not have been responsible for, but the Android tablet is the first time I've been wow'd by a Google UX. I'd be more interested in seeing Matias Duarte's picks.

jmspring2• 15 years ago

The only UI examples that stand out when I think of google are:

- GMail -- more for the rich use of javascript that a stunning UI. Effective, simple, and performant.

- The main website -- simple, loads quickly, etc.

- Android (Froyo and beyond) -- there are elements I really wish Apple would adopt - widgets, unobtrusive notification system, etc.

Beyond those, I really haven't seen a UI/UX example from google worth being wow'd about.

panic• 15 years ago

Google Maps should be on that list. Can you remember the sort of maps we used to put up with on the web?

mbesto• 15 years ago

I think you meant to say Google UI. There are a lot of instances where people think Google's UI is not polished. UX is more than just the UI you see on Android tablet. Some notable UX achievements of Google:

- Search

- Google Analytics

- Gmail, gmaps, calenders, spreadsheets, etc

- Groups

UX failures: (and yet had pretty decent UI's)

- Buzz

- Wave

Sidenote - TIL about bagcheck.com, looks pretty cool.

eps• 15 years ago

Just a quick note on Don't make me think - go to your bookstore and flip through it. There is about two paragraphs worth of an actual material in the book, the rest is a filler. Think - a moderately insightful blog post stretched into a book... it is one of few books that I regret paying for.

thibaut_barrere• 15 years ago

Just to add a different point of view: this was probably the first eyes-opener for me, both on writing and design.

I can only personally recommend it :)

Favorite design books (Irene Au - Google Head of UX)

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