Name: Immersive Content and Usability
Author: Preston So
ISBN: 978-1-952616-28-0

foreword by Reginé Gilbert

Create incisive and inclusive user-centered experiences across augmented, extended, and virtual realities.

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From stone tablets to paper pages to backlit screens, humans have always created and shaped content to fit the containers available to us. But increasingly, the lines between our physical and digital surroundings are blurring—and we need to design usable and accessible content for an ever-expanding array of contexts.

Preston So guides designers, content strategists, and engineers on a journey through the emerging realm of immersive content design. Learn to create incisive and inclusive user-centered experiences across augmented, extended, and virtual realities, transforming the physical world into an exciting new canvas for content.

This book explores:

Immersive tech like beacons, digital signs, and extended reality
Assessing and leveraging existing content for immersive environments
Techniques for storyboarding, diagramming, and mapping spatial content
Strategies for designing accessible and inclusive immersive content
Best practices for testing immersive content

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Preston So guides design practitioners through an inspiring and actionable journey, traversing between digital rectangles and the physical world. An excellent primer to crafting contextually aware experiences of value, this book equips readers with the essentials needed for creating welcoming, useful, and empowering content.

Jaleh Afshar

Director of design at Meta

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Preston So unpacks a complex and formidable topic and examines it in an engaging and inviting way. Throughout Immersive Content and Usability, So inspires us to use content to create better pathways of connection with information and each other—in real and virtual worlds, and in between.

Erika Abrams

Executive creative director of the Los Angeles Design Festival

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Preston leads the way through a thorny thicket of immersive technologies and into the nutritious fruits of inclusive design and equitable experience creation. I yelled “Yes!” out loud as I read this inspiring and accessible book. I think you will too.

Rob Ray

Senior technical experience designer at Electronic Arts and associate professor of design at CSU, San Bernardino

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About the Author

Preston So (he/they) is a digital architect and strategist, designer and developer advocate, and polyglot educator and speaker. He is the author of Immersive Content and Usability (A Book Apart, 2023), Gatsby: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly, 2021), Voice Content and Usability (A Book Apart, 2021), and Decoupled Drupal in Practice (Apress, 2018).

A globally recognized authority on the intersections of content, design, and code, Preston has been a product, design, engineering, and innovation leader since 2015 at organizations like Oracle, Acquia, Time Inc., and Gatsby. Preston is an editor at A List Apart, columnist at CMSWire, and contributor to Smashing Magazine, and has delivered keynotes around the world in three languages. He is based in New York City, where he can often be found immersing himself in languages that are endangered or underserved.