Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44350 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 331 pages

Review
"This is a definitely good book to study before you set out to design some new application or website and maybe an inspiration to revisit existing material." - John Collins, news@UK, September 2006

From the Publisher
This convenient resource offers advice on creating user-friendly interface designs--whether they're delivered on the Web, a CD, or a "smart" devices like a cell phone. Solutions to common UI design problems are expressed as a collection of patterns--each one containing concrete examples, recommendations, and warnings. Intended for designers with basic UI design knowledge.

About the Author
For more than a decade, Jenifer Tidwell has been designing and building user interfaces for a variety of industry verticals, often in the Java programming language. She has experience in designing both desktop and Web applications. As a user interface designer at The MathWorks, Jenifer was instrumental in a redesign of the charting and visualization UI of MATLAB, which is used by researchers, students, and engineers worldwide to develop cars, planes, proteins, and theories about the universe.

Customer Reviews

The best interface book on the market today
Jenifer has been asking for pattern contributions on the various special-interest lists since 2002. This book is the brilliant culmination of her work. Not only can she write, she talked O'Reilly into including hundreds of color illustrations to help clarify the concepts and techniques. A beautiful and thoroughly useful book that should be on every web designer's bookshelf.

Where's the meat?
It has to be said that this is a nicely presented book - glossy, colourful. Curiously for a book about interaction/usability i found parts of it hard to read - i actually got lost on one page as to which was the next piece of text to read. (Bit ironic!)
My real dissatisfaction with the book lies in its lack of meaty content. I have been designing and coding UIs for many years but i expected to pick up some insights. I don't think i learned anything - it is all mere common sense. I had hoped for more. If this is the best UI book at the moment, then I'll save my money and not buy another. Maybe if you are new to the subject you will find it informative.

Hard to read
I found this book extremely difficult to read. The typeface was not easy on the eye. It's sans serif, slightly wider than standard and not quite black. Coupled with this, the pages are a bit wider than usual so you have to follow the line further. I was looking at the words rather than reading, which proved such hard work that I gave up.
Dipping into the book randomly suggests that it contains pearls of wisdom but I'm amazed that a book on designing user interfaces has been too poorly presented to be easily readable.