Think in 4D: Design brilliant user experiences and valuable digital products

by Erica Heinz

Overview

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, 40 exercises, and a bonus collection of free templates help any student, professional, or entrepreneur level up.

Erica Heinz shares evergreen principles and refined methods drawn from 20 years of experience as a digital design consultant in New York City plus a variety of undergraduate and graduate design courses. Think in 4D unites behavioral psychology, business strategy, visual principles, research methods, and human-centered design practices to provide a pithy, visual cheat sheet for hundreds of design ideas and an essential handbook for any digital citizen.

• Part I, FRAMEWORK outlines the easy-to-remember 4D thinking model. Four phases (threads, impressions, interactions, and memories) and three dimensions (2D, 3D, and 4D) split the complexity of digital product design into manageable yet integrated parts. The method has seven key tenets - prototype, lower the fidelity, work backwards, work in circles, use principles, use metrics, and co-create - that focus and speed work.
• Part II, PRACTICE, provides guidelines for putting the model into action. The four phases and three layers yield twelve chapters spanning 2D (words, layouts, symbols, and images), 3D (inclusivity, flexibility, usability, and personalization), and 4D (relationships, patterns, paths, and moments) focus areas. Each chapter includes key questions, cognitive principles, examples, exercises, and user research tips. Each phase ends with a larger design challenge and critique outline for a key deliverable (concepts, flows, screens, or links).
• Part III, CRAFT, refines the practice with ways to advance both creative and conceptual skills. Prototyping is the tangible craft, so the book shares ways to sketch, wireframe, and play more effectively. Thinking is the invisible craft, so the book shows readers how to deconstruct, frame, research, diverge, converge, differentiate, and think in 4D.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798988034940
Publisher:	Jubilee Bridges
Publication date:	10/24/2023
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

Erica Heinz has over 20 years of experience working as a digital designer and strategist in New York City, creating apps, websites, and services that are used by millions of people every day. She has taught undergraduate and graduate design classes at Parsons and the School of Visual Arts, led prototyping and user experience labs in Fortune 100 accelerators and NYC incubators, and spoken on topics from creative thinking to CSS.

Editorial Reviews

11/06/2023

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

BookLife Reviews

"[A]n 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."

-Kirkus Reviews

"I've never felt more confident being able to start from nothing. It totally changed my communication tactics and moved ambiguous product conversations forward. Applying the 4D structure to early product definition workshops got stakeholders aligned and inspired about what we're building and why."

-Erin Nolan, Product Design Lead at Coinbase

From the Publisher