Experience Design

This is the best web introductory "design" book I've seen, and I read many web design books, and am generally quite critical on my reviews.I'm a web development specialist with good technology and business background. I'm also one of the "blind" people in the world--see everything, but have very little appreciation for it. The book's large pictures do what the author is aiming for--it forces the reader to reflect on what the pictures is trying to say--emotionally--thus the title "experiencing design". The author then explains the picture's "design concept" and applies this concept for the web. Note that he is explaining the entire design concept, not just "drawing artistic" design--he explains interactivity, visual content management, message. Thus, this book is much more than just a web artistry book.Based on what I've seen of the web, very few designers really understand the concepts the author explains. I've never read a book with quite an unusual format as this. Perhaps that's because I haven't read many art design books. From my limited art design background, I'd say this book carries some degree of genius in introducing web designs.For me, this book was slow reading, because I had to really think through what the author was trying to say. It's a book filled with lots of pretty pictures, but it takes some time to understand what the author is saying.

shedroff doesnt spell out formulas. he provides inspiration. in a world where there isn't a lot of fresh thinking going on (let's consider the referential work of insecure writers who "quotily" hang on the coat-tails of popular authors) shedroff is willing to say what he believes. he is ambitious and draws from a wide range of subjects, presenting a massive spread of ideas that demand his readers concentrate and consider. and as with any experience, the book isnt a separated set of logic, but a smear, which considers all things together, as one. its a generalized approach to thinking, not particulate. this means its about art, not logic.in the end, shedroff has written an excellent book that provides doors to new ideas. if you want to be told how to think and what to do, look elsewhere. if you want a book that gives you options, Experience Design does it.

shedroff doesnt spell out formulas. he provides inspiration. in a world where there isn't a lot of fresh thinking going on (lets consider the referential work of insecure writers who "quotily" hang on the coat-tails of popular authors) shedroff is willing to say what he believes. he is ambitious and draws from a wide range of subjects, presenting a massive spread of ideas that demand his readers concentrate and consider. and as with any experience, the book isnt a separated set of logic, but a smear, which considers all things together, as one. its a generalized approach to design. its not particulate. its about the art, not the logic.in the end, shedroff has written an excellent book that provides doors to new ideas. if you want to be told how to think and what to do, look elsewhere. if you want a book that gives you options, Experience Design does it.

...Web designers constantly face the challenge of creating yet another original Web site that sets its own style. Experience Design 1 by Nathan Shedroff approaches the challenge of combining visual design, branding, and information architecture, in a new way -- through the lens of experience design. Because of this approach, the book is valuable for creators everywhere, from visual designers, to writers, to project managers.Shedroff was the creative director of vivid studios, a Web shop known for its innovative design and brand-building through the nineties. In his work with clients like Nike and Herman Miller, the author learned what big ticket clients really want. Beyond needing a cool site and a memorable brand, they want to provide their customers with an experience. Shedroff has taken what he learned from those years and distilled it into Experience Design 1. The book is about the experience a design creates, from beginning to end. The author takes familiar concepts like feedback, interactivity, and usability, and illustrates each with an online and offline example. In doing so, Shedroff lets you extract the essence of the user experience from the particular media in which it takes place....Since reading Experience Design 1, I've found myself returning to it -- not as a reference manual, but as an inspirational tool. In those dreaded moments when the checkerboard pattern of the Photoshop tabula rasa seems to stretch on forever, flipping to a random page and reading about the windows in a French museum or the performers in a circus always seems to replenish my creative juices.

I bought this book and love it! This book reminds me alot of the work done by Buckminster Fuller, Paulo Soleri and other visionaries like George Lakoff ("Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things") Rosalind Picard ("Affective Computing") and all of the Edward Tufte's work. This guy is onto something big--a field that is new and getting bigger every day--experience design. Either you get it or you don't. If you are a geek looking for a book on how to handle digital artifacts that you can't feather in Photoshop 6.0 and want techo help, don't buy this book. Go to a hardware store. There are 10,000 titles out there that can help you. This book is unique--it's about experience design.... However, I think alot of nuts and bolts web designers and developers will benefit enormously from reading this book.When Marshall McCluhan wrote "Understanding Media" most people didn't get it and it seems that the same is true of some of the reviews on this site. By way of background, I am extremely biased and have been a Nathan fan as are a bunch of other people much more notable than me--major design gurus like Clement Mok, Richard Saul Wurman (who once described Nathan as a prodigy) and a host of others. Nathan's web work (as well as his other design work in other media) is legendary in the industry. Remember the cover of one of the early "Wired" magazine issues that spoke glowingly about the "Johnny Mneumonic" web hunt? Guess who invented that? Nathan. That is experience design. The Windows 95 Product Release site where you could download new product and was the heaviest hit site in history the day it went up? Nathan. That's experience design. The interactive "build your own bank" experience at Bank of America in 1995? That's experience design. Nathan. Point made. As I read it,this book is intended to get at the underlying design principles of an emerging field that Nathan and his colleagues call "experience design." It drives everything. This is an incredible book that lays out the foundation theory of interactive experience design and then provides the reader with an incredible assortment of experiences which are catalogued very systematically for the reader. You have to get off your butt and interact with them, not just read about them in the book--that's the point. For example, if you read "Experience Design" and go see "De La Guarda" -pages 292, you will discover that it is a theatical experience not a web site (as one reviewer claims)! And if you go to "De La Guarda," as I did on Nathan's recommendation, you will have your mind blown and learn new things about how information can be presented in 3 dimensional space with audience interaction. Take "Cirque du Soleil" on pages 128-129. The book lays out a new view of why this works. Try buying a chair... which is described on pp. 76-77. Read why the site works in the book, try the site and then you will know why so many B2C sites have hit the wall and failed but could be great like this one is. Bu