Cadence & Slang

by Nick Disabato

Cadence & Slang is a small book about interaction design: a series of rules that advocate simplicity, consistency, and humanity in technology.

Genres: Design, Nonfiction

144 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2010

About the author

Nick Disabato is an interaction designer and writer who loves making great things and having great conversations. He has very curly hair, and he runs a small design consultancy called Draft, which you can read about at draft.nu. He thinks you're probably great. For more information, and to get in touch, you can head over to nickd.org.

Reviews

[Bluehat · Rating 1 out of 5]

I started this book with extremely high hopes but found it dry, preachy, uninformative, out of touch, and tedious to even skim. The author could stand to take his own advice on organizing ideas well, having empathy for the reader, and using as few words as possible to explain the point. It was also annoying to hear him talk about how this or that was a net financial positive at the end through sheer wishful thinking. Good design isn't always going to be the same or cheaper to manufacture or a net positive financially. It will often require compromises, and that there's nothing wrong with that. Generally, a lot of the information seemed like a dangerous combination of condescending and detached from reality.

A perfect example is his stove dial example. He suggests that the front panel of the stove be taller to so the dials can be placed in a more legible manner, and says that this wouldn't be that much more difficult to manufacture and that it would be an overall improvement to the stove. Unfortunately, stoves generally have ovens below the panels, which go basically as low as most humans can comfortably bend. This means you either need to have a smaller oven or force people to wield hot items outside of the range where they can do so safely and comfortably. The stoves also generally don't get taller because then they would be taller than the counter top and also more difficult for shorter people to safely work with.

Design choices don't exist in a vacuum. I purchased this book in the hopes that it would give me a beginner's understanding of how to balance the many competing challenges involved in making a well-designed product. It did not deliver.

[Rohit · Rating 3 out of 5]

A thoughtful, polite treatise on good interaction design. Organizes and sums up a lot of the key research, so perhaps more appealing to non-designers or junior designers than more seasoned practioners.

[Larry Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cadence & Slang does an excellent job of explaining the fundamentals of interaction design. It's thorough but approachable. Highly recommended for anyone who builds things that people interact with.

[Grant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found the "cadence" and "slang" metaphor a little forced... definitely not the most intuitive use of terminology there. The book is nicely designed and simple/elegant, so practices what it preaches in that regard. Many of the insights are basic and would be stuff you've already read in other books if you've already read much UX-related literature, as I have. But nothing wrong with reinforcing good points, such as importance of ethnographic research. Not sure I agreed with Disabato's hard line on modes, however -- he argues that modes should be entirely avoided in interface design, but not sure that's practical or even desirable all the time. Forcing a design to be modeless can result in an overly cluttered interface and could also confuse users, who are by now habituated to interact with modes.

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