A look at “Cadence & Slang” by Nick Disabato

Late last week I had the pleasure of being introduced to Nick Disabato, who is in the process of creating a book to serve as a style guide for good interaction in design. I thought that Nick was tackling a really interesting subject, so I asked him to share some information on his upcoming book with the readers here at Positive Space. Since I really enjoy the Kickstarter community, and Nick is using it to fund his book, I thought it would be a great way to help him spread his idea and hopefully encourage some of you back his project.

Hey all. I’m Nick Disabato, an interaction designer from Chicago. I’m writing a book called Cadence & Slang that’s coming out in 2010. I’m writing, editing, designing, and typesetting it by myself. I’m revising it with the help of some close friends and colleagues. My friend Daniel Bogan is doing the illustrations. Right now I have a Kickstarter project going on to fund its independent production, and as of press time, we’re over 40% of the way there.

What’s inside the book

Cadence & Slang is a style guide for good interactions. A huge part of interaction design is coming up with creative solutions to unique situations. But at this point, the majority of it is about ensuring sensible, conventional solutions that are easy for people to understand, and useful once they’re adopted.

For better or worse, only a handful of significant interaction models have really gained traction in the past few decades. For example, in my daily life, I usually use just two: the keyboard-and-mouse of my computers, and the touchscreen on my phone. And while these models may change in the long term - I don’t expect people to use mice forever - they’re around for long enough, with enough products written for them, that conventions arise and rules can be codified. Fitts’s law, for example, is at its most useful when designing any interfaces that are controlled by a mouse.

But I don’t expect any guidelines to be distilled into black & white issues. All rules exist to be bent and broken by those sensitive enough to understand the tradeoffs in doing so. But by having these written down someplace, they may provide a framework, a starting point, for more humane, useful products. That’s my hope, at least.

Why this all matters

Cadence & Slang isn’t only for designers. It doesn’t talk in any lingo specific to our field; it’s not born of a scene that celebrates itself. Making good design a reality is about everyone adopting the right attitudes, no matter their job title. As Panic Inc.’s Steven Frank recently noted, good experiences run the entire way down the software stack. They require good performance and reliability; these problems concern the left-brained and the right-brained equally.

So how does this all happen? How do you create it? There’s no perfect formula, of course - especially not in a field that’s prone to reinventing itself every eighteen months. But having a place to start builds consensus between teams with different priorities.

Everybody says they want to make something that’s “simple,” “elegant,” “user-friendly.” But those terms are hollow if you refuse to address how they pertain to your product, and what you’ll do to get there. A fairly big chunk of Cadence & Slang exposes and addresses this - but again, as a starting point.

You’re part of this

Maybe you struggle with these problems as a freelancer, or as the lone designer in an organization that doesn’t yet understand the value of good experiences. Or maybe you’re part of management, and you’re wondering about the success of various simple, well-designed products over the past decade. No matter your role, I hope you’ll get something out of Cadence & Slang. If this sounds interesting so far, there’s a lot more information over at my Kickstarter page, where fancy pre-orders and other goodies can be yours on the cheap. I’ve also been writing a bunch of other long posts about usability and design, both inside said Kickstarter project and at a dedicated site, called I see what you did there.

I’m really excited at our progress so far. If you’d like to talk about anything, I’d love to hear from you: just fire an email over to nickd[at]nickd[dot]org.