Design for Real Life

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Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Design for Real Life

About Design for Real Life

You can't always predict who will use your products, or what emotional state they'll be in when they do. But by identifying stress cases and designing with compassion, you'll create experiences that support more of your users, more of the time.

Join Sara Wachter-Boettcher and Eric Meyer as they turn examples from more than a dozen sites and services into a set of principles you can apply right now. Whether you're a designer, developer, content strategist, or anyone who creates user experiences, you'll gain the practical knowledge to test where your designs might fail (before you ship!), vet new features or interactions against more realistic scenarios, and build a business case for making decisions through a lens of kindness. You can't know every user, but you can develop inclusive practices that support a wider range of people. This book will show you how.

About the authors

Eric A. Meyer started working on the web in late 1993. Since then, he’s been a college webmaster, one of the original CSS Samurai, a standards evangelist at Netscape, the author of many books and online resources, an occasional code artist, a speaker at many conferences, and a Developer Advocate at Igalia. He lives with his family in Cleveland, Ohio, which is a much nicer city than you’ve been led to believe.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher is a leadership coach, speaker, author, and the CEO of Active Voice, a company dedicated to creating bold leaders and better workplaces in design and tech. She started Active Voice after spending a decade running a content and UX consultancy. In addition to Design for Real Life, she’s also the author of Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and other Threats of Toxic Tech (WW Norton) and Content Everywhere (Rosenfeld Media).

Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
Challenge Your Vision
Make Space for Real People
Incorporate Stress Cases
Communicate Context and Intent
Cultivate Compassion
Learn From Users
Humanize Your Process
Make the Case
Conclusion
Resources
Acknowledgements
About the Authors