It's the little things that turn a good digital product into a great one. With this full color practical book, you'll learn how to design effective microinteractions: the small details that exist inside and around features. How can users change a setting? How do they turn on mute, or know they have a new email message? Through vivid, real-world examples from today's devices and applications, author Dan Saffer walks you through a microinteraction's essential parts, then shows you how to use them in a mobile app, a web widget, and an appliance. You'll quickly discover how microinteractions can change a product from one that's tolerated into one that's treasured. Explore a microinteraction's structure: triggers, rules, feedback, modes, and loops Learn the types of triggers that initiate a microinteraction Create simple rules that define how your microinteraction can be used Help users understand the rules with feedback, using graphics, sounds, and vibrations Use modes to let users set preferences or modify a microinteraction Extend a microinteraction's life with loops, such as "Get data every 30 seconds"

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 Engineering
Interaction 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 design. But if you've ever marveled at the joy of using an iPhone, shared your photos on Flickr, used an ATM machine, recorded a television show on TiVo, or ordered a movie off Netflix, you've encountered good interaction design: products that work as well as they look.
Interaction design is the new field that defines how our interactive products behave. Between the technology that powers our devices and the visual and industrial design that creates the products' aesthetics lies the practice that figures out how to make our products useful, usable, and desirable.
This thought-provoking new edition of "Designing for Interaction" offers the perspective of one of the most respected experts in the field, Dan Saffer. This book will help you
learn to create a design strategy that differentiates your product from the competition
use design research to uncover people's behaviors, motivations, and goals in order to design for thememploy brainstorming best practices to create innovativenew products and solutionsunderstand the process and methods used to define product behavior
It also offers interviews and case studies from industry leaders on prototyping, designing in an Agile environment, service design, ubicomp, robots, and more.

If you want to get started in new era of interaction design, this is the reference you need. Touch screens on mobile devices and ATMs let us manipulate things onscreen with our but there's been no central source of information about gestural interface technology - until now. "Designing Gestural Interfaces" provides you with essential information about kinesiology, sensors, ergonomics, physical computing, touchscreen technology, and new interface patterns: all you need to know to augment your existing skills in 'traditional' websites, software, or physical products. Packed with informative illustrations and photos, this book helps you: learn the process of designing gestural interfaces, from documentation to prototyping to communicating to the audience what the product does; get an overview of technologies surrounding touch screens and interactive environments; examine current patterns and trends in touchscreen and gestural design; learn about the techniques used by practicing designers and developers today; see how other designers have solved interface challenges in the past; and, look at future trends in this rapidly evolving field. Only half a dozen years ago, the gestural interfaces introduced in the film "Minority Report" were science fiction. Now, because of technological, social, and market forces, we see similar interfaces deployed everywhere. "Designing Gestural Interfaces" will help you enter this new world of possibilities.