Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design

Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design
Price: $49.95 USD
Designing a good interface isn't easy. Users demand software that is well-behaved, good-looking, and easy to use. Your clients or managers demand originality and a short time to market. Your UI technology -- web applications, desktop software, even mobile devices -- may give you the tools you need, but little guidance on how to use them well.

UI designers over the years have refined the art of interface design, evolving many best practices and reusable ideas. If you learn these, and understand why the best user interfaces work so well, you too can design engaging and usable interfaces with less guesswork and more confidence.

"Designing Interfaces" captures those best practices as design patterns -- solutions to common design problems, tailored to the situation at hand. Each pattern contains practical advice that you can put to use immediately, plus a variety of examples illustrated in full color. You'll get recommendations, design alternatives, and warnings on when not to use them.

Each chapter's introduction describes key design concepts that are often misunderstood, such as affordances, visual hierarchy, navigational distance, and the use of color. These give you a deeper understanding of why the patterns work, and how to apply them with more insight.

A book can't design an interface for you -- no foolproof design process is given here -- but "Designing Interfaces" does give you concrete ideas that you can mix and recombine as you see fit. Experienced designers can use it as a sourcebook of ideas. Novice designers will find a roadmap to the world of interface and interaction design, with enough guidance to start using these patterns immediately.

Author: Jenifer Tidwell
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Customer Reviews
  • Visual examples for designing for Information Interchange
    This book is by far the best book that does for the User Interface world of computing what Edward R. Tufte's series of books does for the writer's of technical reports and their needs to present and represent many varied types of data and data interaction. Need to show the effects of miles marched, time required to cover terrain, and temperature on Napoleon's armies march on Moscow and show the number of troops he has left alive at every point along the journey? Tufte shows how the French engineer Charles Minard did so. "Designing Interfaces" does exactly the same thing by showing how various UI pioneers have done the same for the Man-Machine interface. Want to see which issues are getting the most reporting in Google News and how fast or slow those issues are fading from the landscape? Check out the marumishi "Treemap" described on page 205 of Designing Interfaces. Highly recommended.
  • A staple for your design library
    Designing Interfaces catalogs UI design patterns in use and provides guidance in using them, with plenty of examples. It takes a consistent approach to describing each pattern: What it is, when to use it, why to use it and how to use it. The book is both a good overview and a reference. If UI design is an area of interest to you, then read through this book and then keep it available as a reference.
  • More Practical Concepts, Less Psychology
    While I don't own a physical copy of this book, I had used an electronic form of it in the course of my studies. <br /> <br />I will first forewarn those who are interested in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) that this text does not heavily focus on the science of Psychological principles such as Gestalt Perception, nor does it concern itself with techniques/methodologies such as Threading and Model-View-Controller (MVC) to improve the performance of programs. The focus of this text falls strictly on the layout and/or graphical design in regards to interfaces and web pages. <br /> <br />As well, each principle has certain uses depending on the medium used, which the text does a good job of elaborating (for example, cell phone programs would not be designed the same as a full Windows Application). <br /> <br />A word to the wise though: Requirements must come before Design. There are certain design principles outlined in this text that cannot be realized if the very requirements of the program do not allow for it - For example, Microsoft Office 2007 has in many ways disregarded the principle of habituation/familiarity (as it looks much different from typical Windows Applications in general). One will still need the skill of compromise in order to apply the information presented here effectively in the real world.
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