I just finished reading Giles Colborne’s “Simple and Usable” – a delightfully compact, practical and highly readable book about interaction design. I’m glad the book isn’t one of those books that tries to solve everything about interaction design. Instead, it’s a book from a designer telling stories about his experiences solving design problems to someone who is interested in, but may not be an expert in the subject.
I did find the initial part of the book about design approaches a bit straightforward, mainly because it contained a lot of good design principles I had been hearing a lot elsewhere as well. However, I think it was a necessary in order to provide appropriate context for the four strategies for simplicity, which was the main focus of the book.
However, the main strengths of this book is the way it unfolds. Each page is provides a little story or lesson with a nice big photo next to it, and you’re not forced to dig too deep into theory or complex abstractions. The stories, when added up, provide a sort of perspective about design that’s actually quite holistic. And because each story was neatly fit into one page, it felt as though I was having a conversation of sorts, with the author narrating his experiences around this subject.
This is a really great way to explain design, because it’s not a hard science, but neither is it completely subjective. When I was fairly new to design, one of the hardest things to understand was how designers think and work. There are a ton of design books out there, many of them are either too technical, too sublime, too visionary, or a combination of the three. I still find that as a practicing designer now, we don’t talk enough about our experiences in doing design and fetishize outputs and ideas all too much.
It’s hard not to recommend this book to anyone. I really think it’s a very usable book, and it’ll be a staple on my bookshelf to remind myself of the little things that I need to consider when I think about my work.
