Brave NUI World: Designing Natural User Interfaces for Touch and Gesture

by Daniel Wigdor, Dennis Wixon

Brave NUI World is the first practical guide for designing touch- and gesture-based user interfaces. Written by the team from Microsoft that developed the multi-touch, multi-user Surface® tabletop product, it introduces the reader to natural user interfaces (NUI). It gives readers the necessary tools and information to integrate touch and gesture practices into daily work, presenting scenarios, problem solving, metaphors, and techniques intended to avoid making mistakes. This book considers diverse user needs and context, real world successes and failures, and the future of NUI. It presents thirty scenarios, giving practitioners a multitude of considerations for making informed design decisions and helping to ensure that missteps are never made again. The book will be of value to game designers as well as practitioners, researchers, and students interested in learning about user experience design, user interface design, interaction design, software design, human computer interaction, human factors, information design, and information architecture.

Genres: Design, Technology

264 pages, Paperback

First published April 29, 2011

Reviews

[Kaci · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found this book to be poorly written and organized. The language was bloated and wordy. It was extremely repetitious.

There were few solid examples and most required an understanding of certain technology. This could have been significantly better by just including helpful images and photography of some of the technology they referred to. I've never worked with the Microsoft Surface before, but it was one of the most often cited examples, which makes it little hard to follow.

They gave recommendations on how to fix challenges by referencing tools talked about later in the book. In Chapter 21, they say "Use the RITE Method, described in Chapter 29, to adjust..." Get to Chapter 29, but they must assume you already know what the RITE Method is, because they barely discuss it.

Overall, not impressed. Surely there's a better book out there on touch...

[Sam Levatich · Rating 4 out of 5]

just a heads up, not brave new world

[Atrium-V · Rating 4 out of 5]

So good. But a bit old, considering technology evolved a lot since 2011. But all those great guidelines. Fabulous.