Great Design – Table of Contents

Articles in gray are still being written. Many of these articles are derived from chapters in User Interface Design for Programmers.

(* = first draft)

Introduction

Introduction to Great Design*
What is Design?*
What Makes It Great?*

Good Design

User Model vs. Program Model
Choices
Affordances and Metaphors
Broken Metaphors
Consistency and Hobgoblins
Modes
Put users in control
Design for Extremes
Users don’t read
Users can’t control the mouse
Users can’t remember anything
Activity Based Design
Usability Testing
Relativity (UI Time Warps)
How Do It Know?
Tricks of the Trade
UIs that Kill
Beta Testing
The Onion in the Varnish
Information Design / Answering the Right Question
Shipping is a Feature

Great Design

Introduction to Black Magic of Great Design
Aesthetics
Emotional Design
Designing the Social Interface
Building Communities
Obsessive Attention to Detail
Taking Things Away
Playing with Fire (making things worse)
User happiness vs. user success

About the author.

In 2000 I co-founded Fog Creek Software, where we created lots of cool things like the FogBugz bug tracker, Trello, and Glitch. I also worked with Jeff Atwood to create Stack Overflow and served as CEO of Stack Overflow from 2010-2019. Today I serve as the chairman of the board for Stack Overflow, Glitch, and HASH.