My go-to pre-job-interview book. If you're a seasoned IxD veteran this book won't help you progress the field of design forward in any compelling ways. However, it will give you quick, simple anecdotes and examples consumable for a non-design audience. Alternatively, if you're working with with a new team of non-designers, this book would act as a great 1-night read to bring them up to speed.

Found this while unpacking at my new place and gave it a reread. Much like the book Don't Make Me Think did for usability testing, this book takes a nice simple approach to breaking down the many aspects of interaction design a designer could use.

Very light touch on every technique and method in the design process with short case studies and interviews with fields' experts (which I skipped mostly because I didn't find them super informative).

I would recommend this book if you are new in design, and don't know where to start.

Good foundation for the discipline. Well written and concise. A little lofty at times.

to better understand what my husband does with his work days - pretty fascinating sofar

A good introductory book for anyone trying to grasp the idea behind interaction design. Not opening completely new fields of research, but presenting the problems and some approaches to succeed in entering the area.

Although written for designers, the book provides structure for managing creativity when coming up with new services and products. Useful for people dealing with new product development and for entrepreneurs in general - as it focuses greatly on user needs and user appreciation of his/her interaction with the product/service. Nice examples and interesting peek into the future of systems around us as well as their design needs.

Many passages seemed too basic - like explaining why design for services is needed.

I'm not giving this book a top rating, but that's only because I used a single chapter from it in the framework of my design thesis on border security and therefore cannot speak to the book as a whole. Specifically, I read the chapter on service design, which incorporates scholarship from experience design. Saffer's frameworks are clear and easy to understand, and his commitment to the art is obvious. I recommend Saffer to anyone who wants to know what service design is and how it should work. It's not necessarily a foundational text, but it's a good jumping-off point before moving on to the more theoretical works by Blomkvist and others. If the rest of the book is anything like this chapter, I recommend it to any design students interested in experience, interaction or HCI.

A gentle introduction to what the heck Interaction Designers generally do.

Excellent as an overview of doing design, including things that might be considered business strategy, which I like. This book avoids falling into the trap of talking about design as pretty things, and provides an overview of the different approaches to design, and has pointers to other books and resources for learning more. My only criticism is that it can't devote very many words to each topic, because it's a general overview of design rather than a thorough handbook, so you really need to look at the other resources to get a detailed understanding.

Dan Saffer's book is a thorough yet high-level look at the emerging and evolving practice of Interaction Design. Although each chapter could easily be its own book — and in most cases, such books exist — the shallow-yet-broad scope of Designing For Interaction was appealing. Each chapter is sprinkled with interesting interviews with top-notch designers and educators: Hugh Dubberly, Shelley Evenson, Larry Tesler, and more.

With that said, I have two criticisms of this book:

First, in easily 50% of the cases the photos used in the book were completely unnecessary, and only distracted from the content. For example, in the section talking about conducting stakeholder interviews, there's a stock photo of some suit-wearing people interviewing some other suit-wearing people — a helpful visual cue for people unfamiliar with the word "interview."

Second, I found myself gagging when Saffer described "The Four Approaches to Design" which Saffer believes are:

1) User-centered design
2) Activity-centered design
3) Systems design
4) Genius design

He goes on to describe these at length and I read the entire section with my mouth wide open, shocked at how idiotic and frankly wrong dividing these up into "approaches" actually is. The reality is:

- There is always someone/something using the designed product or service.

- There are always some kind of activities a person does with the designed product or service.

- The product or service always fits within some kind of larger systems, and is composed of smaller systems, no matter how insignificant each may be.

- Some need to design based on intuition ("genius" in Saffer's words) will be a part of any product, even in cases where there is time or money to do extensive research.

ALL of these "approaches to design" are present in EVERY project whether a designer chooses to ignore them or not, and dividing them out into distinct approaches caught me very off guard, and seemed out of step with the rest of Dan Saffer's otherwise excellent book.

Good introductory IxD book that discusses more viewpoints than purely human-centered design methodologies. Used it as a framework for teaching an intro design course and found it really helpful.