Foreword -- Preface --  Metaphors and User Interfaces in the 21st Century -- Culture Class vs. Culture Clash -- CHI as a Cross-Tribal Community -- Dare We Define User-Interface Design? -- The Cult of Cute: The Challenge of User-Experience Design -- User-Interface Design and China: A Great Leap Forward -- Universal, Ubiquitous, User-Interface Design for the Disabled and Elderly -- Icons/Symbols and More: Visible Languages to Facilitate Communication -- What Do UI Designers Think About Protecting Their Designs? -- When is a User Not a User? Who Are We? What Do We Do? -- The Emotion Commotion -- The Next Revolution: Vehicle User Interfaces -- Patterns within Patterns -- User-Experience Planning for Corporate Success -- Insights on Outsourcing -- Branding 101 It's About Time.-  User-Centered Design (UCD) in the Enterprise: Corporations Begin to Focus on UCD --  Dreaming of Robots: An Interview About Robots with Bruce Sterling -- The Out-of-Box Home Experience: Remote from Reality -- Usability Grows Up: The Great Debate -- Education and CHI -- When in Rome, Do as the Romans Do: HCII 2005 Recap -- Dashboards in Your Future -- Visualizing the Future of Information Visualization -- HCI Sci-Fi at the Movies and on TV -- Wit and Wisdom: Where Do We Turn for Advice? -- From KidCHI to BabyCHI -- SeniorCHI: The Geezers are Coming! -- Taxonomies to Tax the Couch-Potato's Cortex -- Happy Birthday! CHI at 25 -- Big Spaces, Big Lives, Big Challenges -- Fun! Fun! Fun! In the User Experience -- Am I Pushing Your Buttons? -- The Sun Rises in the East -- HCI Goes Mainstream in the Comics -- Saving the USA, and So Can You: FaceBucks to the Rescue.

This book consists of a series of essays which addresses the essentials of the development processes in user-experience design (UX design) planning, research, analysis, evaluation, training and implementation, and deals with the essential components (metaphors, mental models, navigation, and appearance) of user-interfaces and user-experiences during the period of 2002-2007. These essays grew from the authors own column entitled 'Fast Forward' which appeared in Interaction Magazine - the flagship publication of the ACM Special Interest Group on Human-Computing Interaction (SIGCHI). Written in such a way as to ensure longevity, these essays have not been edited or updated, however a short Postscripts has been added to provide some comments on each topic from a current perspective. HCI and User-Experience Design provides a fascinating historical review of the professional and research world of UX and HCI during a period of significant growth and development and would be of interest to students, researchers, and designers who are interested in recent developments within the field.