A Book That Helps You Truly Understand UX/UI

Most problems in UX/UI design are not about colors or typefaces. They arise when a designer does not understand the internal logic of the interface.

Even major companies make systemic mistakes in their design systems: they confuse buttons with links, mix component states, fail to distinguish between a dropdown list and a menu, and align form fields in ways that contradict their purpose. As a result, the interface looks neat on the surface, but becomes difficult to use.

The Designer’s Guide to the Buttons is a practical book on UX/UI that explains not how to make things beautiful, but how interfaces actually work. It shows that familiar interface elements did not appear by chance, but were shaped through evolution and the selection of working solutions.

The book is intended for a wide range of readers: from beginners taking their first steps in design to professionals who want to understand the logic of interfaces more deeply and learn how to design complex systems.

The book consists of three parts:

• Desktop interfaces, from Xerox and Apple Lisa to macOS and Windows.
• Mobile interfaces, from Apple Newton to iPhone and Android.
• Mixed reality: the interfaces of Quest and Vision Pro headsets.

The History of Interfaces from Xerox Alto to Vision Pro

The book follows a clear historical arc. It begins with the invention of the first graphical user interface at Xerox PARC and ends with the ultra-modern Vision Pro augmented reality headset. Step by step, the author guides you through the evolution of design, from the earliest computers to modern desktop and mobile systems.

The emergence of the first GUIs, the Newton and iPhone revolutions, the interface race between Windows and Mac OS, the birth and death of skeuomorphism, the victory of flat design, and the transition from style libraries to design systems — the book covers all of this not only usefully, but with genuine fascination.

The history of interfaces is woven so naturally into the narrative that the book even includes a chronological timeline divided into historical eras.

The Anatomy of an Interface

Each chapter of the book is devoted to a single component. The book examines buttons, checkboxes, text fields, menus, and dropdown lists at the level of anatomy: what they consist of, which states they have, and why some solutions work while others do not.

The book shows:

• what each component consists of,
• which states it can have and why they are needed,
• how form and behavior affect perception,
• why interface components became the way they are.

The book teaches you to distinguish bad solutions from good ones. You will stop blindly copying other people’s patterns and learn to design complex interfaces with a clear understanding of what you are doing and why.

An Encyclopedia of UX/UI Design

Designers often face the same problem: they need to quickly design an interface element — a dropdown menu, a toolbar, or a form — but there is no suitable example at hand. We start going through familiar products and services, trying to remember where we have already seen a good solution.

The Designer’s Guide to the Buttons solves this problem. The book is written as a true encyclopedia of UI/UX design and works as a desk reference for everyday work.

Inside are more than 500 illustrations, diagrams, and screenshots from 180 real interfaces of well-known apps and services, including Google Docs, Notion, Airbnb, Uber, Revolut, Microsoft Word, and Telegram.

These are not abstract patterns or theoretical diagrams, but solutions tested in practice. The book develops visual experience and helps readers quickly find suitable examples.

Interactive Pages

The book’s structure allows readers to skip difficult sections and return to them later.

In addition, 35 QR codes are scattered throughout its pages, making the book truly interactive. Is something unclear? Just point your phone at the page — and watch a video lesson or read an article.

A Guide to Building a Design System

The Guide to the Buttons is not only a history and an encyclopedia, but also a practical guide to building design systems.

The book shows how design systems are built in large companies. At its core is a simple and visual approach: each component is represented as a matrix of styles and states.

These matrices are:

• universal and have the same structure across all components,
• easy to remember and reproduce,
• logically complete, with no missing states or styles,
• easy to scale as the system grows.

After reading the book, readers will learn to design professional design systems used in large-scale products.

Design Does Not Begin in Figma

Today, design is increasingly reduced to its outward side: colors, typefaces, and corner radii. How an interface is structured and why it works the way it does is discussed far less often.

The Guide to the Buttons gives design back to designers. The book shows how to design interfaces not on the basis of questionable UX research and trends, but from a priori logic and the properties of human perception.

The last time interface design was approached from this perspective was by Jef Raskin in his book The Humane Interface, published in 2000. Since then, interfaces have become far more complex, while our understanding of their nature has weakened even further. This book is an attempt to restore that lost foundation.

About the Author

Andrew Marcus is a designer, writer, traveler, and winner of international awards in interface design.

He is a winner of AIGA 365, a competition held by the American Institute of Graphic Arts, founded in 1914. He has received a Gold Award from the W3 Awards and was included among the best designers of 2023 by CSS Design Awards.

He is a contributing author to UX Collective, with popular articles on table design and infographics.

He has visited more than 95 countries and is the author of a media project about travel, the world, and visual culture — www.andrewmarcus.me