A detailed guide to the connection between body movement and user experience.
A comprehensive look at how awareness of the body can facilitate and enhance product design.
DeSutter, a senior product researcher at Microsoft, and Scopelitis, who holds advanced degrees in dance and learning sciences, share their extensive experience in movement and interaction design in this new guide to product development for researchers, designers, engineers, and product managers. The authors discuss why body language and gestures matter, how they work, how to notice and observe gestures attentively, understanding which gestures are relevant in context and interpreting their meaning, using gestures and body language in team-building, applying gestures in the design process, and how the human body influences technology. DeSutter and Scopelitis break body language into three categories (thinking, communicating, and coordinating), explaining which ones matter at each stage of the design process and identifying when AI and automated tools are useful while noting their inherent limitations. Each chapter opens with a brief table of contents, highlights key ideas in notes and sidebars, and closes with a list of takeaways and “field notes” from the authors. As befits an inherently visual topic, the book is copiously illustrated with more than 100 drawings, photos, tables and diagrams. The text also includes a helpful nine-page index. The work is well organized, and the prose is clear and direct (“If you cannot convince stakeholders of your insights, you have only done half the job”). DeSutter and Scopelitis share real-life examples and use striking images to make key points (“When you raise your arm and lean forward on the sidewalk to hail a cab, your action stops a two-ton vehicle”). The frequent repetition of core ideas (such as the assertion that gestures reinforce meaning) sometimes feels like overselling. The color comic strips by DeSutter interspersed between chapters, in which the authors visit a coffee shop and encounter incompetent human and robot baristas, is a cutesy touch that doesn’t add much to the reader’s understanding; still, product and UX design practitioners will find plenty of useful tips and practical information here.
A detailed guide to the connection between body movement and user experience.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9781959029250
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Rosenfeld Media
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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