Design for Real Life
Eric Meyer & Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Originally published by A Book Apart. Now available directly from the authors.
Our publisher, A Book Apart, is shutting down.
This is sad news for everyone, but it means that we’ve reacquired the rights to Design for Real Life. We plan to make the book freely available online soon. In the meantime, we’ve lowered the price for the existing print and ebook editions as far as we possibly can. This version, with the A Book Apart branding, will only be available until September 2024—so if you want the original edition in your library, get a copy now.
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.
Chapter list
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
Where to buy
Canada: Chapters / Indigo
Sweden: Adlibris
UK: Foyles, Waterstones, Blackwell’s
Germany: Thalia.de
Australia and New Zealand: Fishpond
Ebook: Apple, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo
You can also find the book on Amazon in many countries, but we recommend an independent seller where possible.
Praise for Design for Real Life
“Kurt Vonnegut said that there was only one rule: ‘You’ve got to be kind.’ This book is what happens when two people apply that rule to building great digital products. It’s about building interfaces that are truly, genuinely human. Anyone who aspires to build global products that people love should read this book now.”
— Paul Ford, cofounder of Postlight and author of “What Is Code?”
“The only user scenarios that matter are our users’ real lives. In this courageous and compassionate book, full of wisdom and methods not collected anywhere else, Eric and Sara guide us through scenarios previously in the dark.”
— Liz Danzico, chair and cofounder, MFA Interaction Design at SVA and VP of design at NPR
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, the technical lead at Rebecca’s Gift, and a cofounder of An Event Apart. He lives with his family in Cleveland.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher is an author, speaker, coach, strategist, and the CEO of Active Voice, a company helping tech and design workers become radical, courageous leaders. 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 and Content Everywhere.