Holds the book, what it says in the title: it brings together what started from our own extensive experience to principles in the design of interactive products (Web, Mobile) has collected, and are therefore a useful guide for not just so easy implementation of simplicity and usability in modern software products at hand.
However, the nice thing about this book is rather that it satisfies the rules and requirements set out for yourself: it is even in the highest degree "simple and usable". But more on that later.
First of all its contents.
Besides introduction and outlook we in a first larger part "Setting a vision" a demolition given about the world in which a designer is in his work. It is taught that the important thing the user is that you can love his office this - to leave that all experiences must eventually be brought together in a product back, which is to impress the customers, which primarily - or even his own thinking but should be simple and useful, but which is just the art.
How best to achieve this, is presented in four other major chapters. The headings of the chapter name, the individual stages of the process: Remove, Hide, Organize, Displace.
This process is explained at the beginning of using a remote control. To achieve their simplicity, all the unnecessary keys should be removed (Remove). Many of these buttons can be used, for example, under a separate flap hide (Hide). The remaining keys can be summarized useful to groups (Organize).
A very important point in designing is that you can move not so few of the possible functions or buttons useful to a very different place back: in the menu of a television, the computer, or even to the user itself (Displace).
By going through this lengthy work process eventually to a product with a captivating simplicity. And this the author tries the reader to carry out in his book repeatedly in mind: Just what is simple and the user Nützende it is, which is not easy to achieve.
Only through hard and arduous work, through all of the many user-observations, many trade-offs between alternative designs, the sophisticated break down of the required functions and the artful combining of all these things in the user interface, it is possible to arrive at a product that is really easy and useful.
At this point it's time to talk on the design of the book itself to come.
As reported in various reviews, offers the book through his special presentation. It does not contain a continuous text, which stretches over the sides, using all aspects of the work of a designer describes in detail.
Rather, it is designed so that it consists of a sequence highly-frills, short texts (each on the left), which is associated with (on the opposite right side) a striking picture as possible along with catchy headline.
In this text are like image and headline simple and highly usable: In a nutshell, I learn the most important thing on a particular subject, set lively and vividly, and can even keep that in mind over the image in the text Discussed.
The book, in my opinion, therefore, is also primarily in the daily implementation of those exciting and important design principles at work.
The many individual aspects that play a role in the art of designing, not lost in a long unadorned text but are in the double pages of text and images while browsing open to light, can be easily carry with them and are easily accessible via the Pictures to memorize.
And if anyone thinks that he should perish in content or content through this simplicity of the presentation of the book a bit, so be it recalls the principle already mentioned above, that just achieving this simplicity and usefulness of the book certainly only by a long, laborious work process of the author has been made possible, in which the content is not lost, but is being brought to the man by the simplicity of the presentation.
In my experience, such books are extremely rare to find, and they are especially invaluable.
