At long last, it’s time to start talking about it.

In March 2008, I will proudly and happily be releasing my newest book, Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action. This time around, instead of talking purely about principles and pointing to web applications that serve as great examples, as I did in Designing the Obvious, I’m aiming the microscope at my own work.

In Designing the Moment, I present over 30 think-out-loud style stories about how I’ve applied web design principles and concepts to real projects, with real clients. In each and every story, I discuss the concepts that helped me make design decisions as I went along, I show each version of the design as it progressed, admit to mistakes, give credit to other people, and generally show how the simple act of continually questioning designs is the key to consistently achieving good results.

The premise behind the title is that it doesn’t matter one tiny bit whether a feature or task flow is considered major, minor, or anything else. What matters is that each moment a user spends trying to understand something in your application and be productive carries with it the potential to either increase his confidence or destroy his trust. It’s not our job as web designers, then, to design screens. It’s to design moments.

In other words, these stories are about applying design principles to create good moments, one step at a time.

If you liked Designing the Obvious, I believe you’ll love Designing the Moment.

It’s available for pre-order right now, and I hope you’ll consider taking some of the little cash you have left over from the holidays to pick up a copy.

Providing the book is released early in enough in March, I’ll be talking about it at SxSW Interactive during a 20-minute solo session by the same name, followed by a book signing. (If it’s not available yet, I may just talk about it anyway, but I may only be able to sign copies of Designing the Obvious. One or both of them will be available at the conference bookstore.)

In the meantime, I need to go finish writing the dern thing. Cheers!

Posted by Robert on December 17th, 2007