Product Description

This completely updated volume presents the effective and practical tools you need to design great desktop applications, Web 2.0 sites, and mobile devices. You’ll learn the principles of good product behavior and gain an understanding of Cooper’s Goal–Directed Design method, which involves everything from conducting user research to defining your product using personas and scenarios. Ultimately, you’ll acquire the knowledge to design the best possible digital products and services.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8773 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 648 pages

From the Back Cover

When the first edition of About Face was published in 1995, the idea of designing products based on human goals was a revolutionary concept. Thanks to the work of Alan Cooper and other pioneers, interaction design is now widely recognized as a unique and vital discipline, but our work is far from finished.

This completely updated volume presents the effective and practical tools you need to design great desktop applications, Web 2.0 sites, and mobile devices. This book will teach you the principles of good product behavior and introduce you to Cooper′s Goal–Directed Design method, from conducting user research to defining your product using personas and scenarios. In short, About Face 3 will show you how to design the best possible digital products and services.

About the Author
For over 30 years Alan Cooper has been a pioneer of the modern computing era. His groundbreaking work in software design and construction has influenced a generation of programmers and business people—and helped a generation of users. He is best known as the "Father of Visual Basic," inventor of personas, and founder of Cooper, the leading design consultancy.

As Director of Design R&D at Cooper, Robert Reimann led dozens of design projects and helped develop many of the methods described in About Face 3. Currently, he is Manager of User Experience at Bose Corporation and President of IxDA, the Interaction Design Association.

David Cronin is Director of Interaction Design at Cooper, where he′s led the design of products for such diverse users as surgeons, museum visitors, online shoppers, automobile drivers, financial analysts, and the elderly.

Customer Reviews

If you really care about users, buy this book
Deeply relevant and very influential: if you're a software developer, you owe it to your users to buy this book.

The book is organised into three distinct parts, each of which has a rather different tone. The first part is an introduction to "personas" and their goals. Much emphasis is placed on detailed research such as interviews with sample users, which is a fine luxury if you have the resources and time! However, even developers working in smaller teams will find the general principles useful.

The second part is concerned with the overall approach that an application should take. It discusses "posture": whether an application should be "full-screen" and sovereign or an infrequently used utility, and how this changes the top-level design.

This second part includes my favourite chapter, "Eliminating Excise", which is really pretty funny - it points out why we find prompts from Word annoying and why Motorola phones are just plain frustrating. However, the advice to fix these frustrations might be a bit over the top unless you have an infinite development budget: I too would love to have multi-level undos that are persistent across application sessions.

The final part covers specific advice on layouts and controls. It brings together more concrete suggestions based on the previous two parts.

It's quite possible that the ideas in this book influenced the design of applications such as Office 2007 and iTunes. Although few developers have the challenge of designing Web sites or applications for the mass market, the advice in this book is worth considering even for corporate applications. Just watch the budget!

The mother of all Interaction Design Books
Maybe you have heard of Interaction design and is already practising in the fields of Graphic Design, Information Architecture or User Experience for digital products. If you are one of those who think that a better integration amongst those fields would work wonders in digital projects, look no further, this is your book.

Alan Cooper, Reimann and Cronin give you the best immersion of this area I have read in years. Although Usability is an area which is not really covered by Interaction Design the work is so thorough that you will know in which stages of digital projects you will be able to include the Usability workflow.

A masterpiece.

a must have
This book is a must have for anyone working in UX fields, its hard going to read from cover to cover but is an excellent reference.