Think in 4D is a book about product experience design: how to think holistically, creatively, and critically to create savvy, successful sites and apps. It pushes the tech industry to think beyond 2D designs and 3D experiences to 4D impacts. More than 500 illustrations and 40 exercises help any student, professional, or entrepreneur level up.
Aimed at readers learning or practicing digital design or managing a product or design team, this illuminating, highly practical guide to digital product design stands out for its clarity, flexibility, and blending of excellent nuts-and-bolts advice with approachable, creativity-nourishing practices. Heinz draws on more than two decades of design work and teaching to lay out a sturdy and adaptable framework— the 4D Thinking model—that splits product design into manageable parts, emphasizing the “threads, impressions, interactions, and memories” of the “product experience” and a “mulitdimensional” understanding of the way the product will be experienced, in 2D (focusing on the words, images, layouts), 3D (focusing on the “usability, flexibility, personalization, and inclusivity” of the product, in physical and artificial environments), and 4D (“the moments, paths, patterns, and relationships that occur over short or long time frames.”)For a digital design to succeed over time, designers must “be choreographers, party planners, and urban planners,” Heinz writes, a statement capturing the book’s inviting, bottom-line-minded approach and tone. Breakdowns of how to apply 4D thinking, from vision to prototype and beyond, are both lucid and inspiring, and Heinz’s insistence on a “low-fidelity” approach to design—working at first with “writing, sketching, and wireframing”—convincingly “focuses the work and its viewers on essential elements.” That emphasis also makes the book likely to endure: none of its scrupulous guidance (“visual hierarchy sorts and exemplifies experiences”; “See components, not screens ”) feels tied to one technological moment or trend.
Instead, Heinz offers hard-won wisdom, fresh tools, and a wealth of pragmatic advice and best practices for planning, designing, laying out, testing, and maintaining digital products that succeed, covering the big-picture work, including ethical considerations and team management, but also the logic behind crucial UI design choices, when to bold text, how much customization to encourage and allow, and how to hunt for “leverage points, where small changes can tip much larger shifts.” And, as befits the subject, the book is laid out with wit, verve, and eye-pleasing simplicity. This product experience is first rate.
Takeaway: First-rate guide to designing digital products that will endure.
Comparable Titles: Michael Youngblood and Benjamin J. Chesluk’s Rethinking Users, Susan Weinschenk’s 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People.
Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
An impressively thorough and clear introduction to a still-new discipline.
OUR VERDICT: GET IT
Heinz offers a guide to the complex contours of interactive design.
The author astutely observes that product design is a “slippery beast”—there is a challenging multiplicity of parts that must be seamlessly combined into a coherent whole by an intricate “co-creation” of collaborators. To help the reader learn “how to think holistically, creatively, and critically” while engaging in interactive design, Heinz presents a helpful schema that divides the process into parts. The product experience itself is broken down into four phases: “Threads” are the “assorted touchpoints” that first connect the potential user to a product, and include everything from a marketing campaign to word-of-mouth information. “Impressions” are the user’s first encounter with images of the product on a screen, a “flash across visitors’ retinas.” “Interactions” make up the bulk of a user’s experience, encounters that live in “Memories,” the fourth and final element, understood as “aggregated internal impacts of an experience.” These four elements are approached from three different perspectives that encompass the various dimensions of the user’s experience; these include 2D (words, images layouts), 3D (devices and environments), and 4D (“the moments, paths, patterns, and relationships that occur over short or long time frames”). This analytical model forms the basis of the entire book, which succinctly details the entire creative landscape of interactive design strategy. Heinz is not providing a rigid system to preempt the creative process, but rather a framework within which creativity can flourish: “even geniuses have to start somewhere.” The author has 20 years of experience as a design consultant in New York City, and her expertise is evident—this is an erudite, savvy book that communicates difficult, technical ideas with accessible, largely jargon-free prose. For both the seasoned veteran of interactive design and the unpolished newcomer, this is an invaluable resource.
An impressively thorough and clear introduction to a still-new discipline.
