Designing Interfaces

by Charles Brewer, Aynne Valencia-Brooks, Jenifer Tidwell, et al.

Book Overview

Designing good application interfaces isn? t easy now that companies need to create compelling, seamless user experiences across an exploding number of channels, screens, and contexts. In this updated... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596008031
• ISBN13: 9780596008031
• Release Date: December 2005
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 331 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 8.0" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Jump-started my problem-solving process

Having already read through the first few chapters, today I sat down with an explicit need: to solve a problem that involved searching and filtering a large set of data. This book came through for me. Yes, some of it appears obvious when you first read through, but once you have a specific problem to address, its true utility emerges. I opened to the Showing Complex Data chapter, and as I read through, ideas began to form. Some came directly from the book, others were inspired by or related to what I was reading. I took notes, and those notes helped me develop the questions about the data and the users I need to answer in order to continue. When you're faced with a design challenge, and you're a bit stymied as to how to proceed, this book will help move the solution forward. Even if you think you have a solution, this book can help you make it fresh and creative.

A Novice Reviews

This book takes an admirable stab at removing the arbitrariness in building an interface from scratch. Tidwell lucidly examines common gestalt design principles and their ramifications in actual designs of web pages, mobile devices and other graphical interface technologies. Proximity, for example, can mean the difference between intuitively linking items in an interface or intuitively creating a distinction between them. Other reviewers bash her for pointing out the obvious, but it is the cataloging, enumerating, condensing of the obvious (sprinkled with the insights of a professional) which makes this book helpful to anyone daunted by the task of making an app that is the Gmail to the quotidian, more-awful-to-use-by-the-second Hotmail.

Not just for designers...

I arrived at "Designing Interfaces" with a hunger for detail and references as we head deep into revising the interface of a whole section of a web site I am in charge of. And the timing couldn't have been better. Jenifer (with one "n") Tidwell is right on the money when it comes to offering a broad range of options to address just about any interface design need you may run into. Her experience working with Matlab's Mathworks didn't limit her to offering advice for client software interface design. Tidwell goes well beyond it, delving into web design and mobile interface waters, which she swims with equal comfort and efficiency. As a matter of fact, at times the presentation of samples from alternate media/platforms (client software or mobile) pulls those of us who are more comfortable within web application development out of our comfort zone, presenting us with innovative ways to solve old problems. All in all, this becomes a must reference for anyone needing to learn or polish skills in software interface design for any medium. And this is not limited to designers: I am an Application Development Manager and I learned a lot from "Designing Interfaces" too.

Widgets and aesthetics

This book is lavishly illustrated and fun to read. The sections are color-coded and there are few pages without at least one full-color illustration. So often, Web app team workers and managers get grey on grey and so often our output reflects that. There are flow patterns, layout patterns, widget patterns galore. All good, but the chapter that gave me the most food for thought was the last, "Making It Look Good: Visual Style and Aesthetics." A Stanford study indicates that the most important factor in Web site credibility is the appearance of the site. This is probably also true of Web applications, but not in the same way. I have often had to go toe to toe with developers and executive managers who want to jazz things up with a far heavier, "more impressive" graphical treatment. VPs and marketers want something snazzy to show clients -- but they forget that someone who actually has to *use* an application in their workday may not find "snazzy" to be attractive at all. Reading this chapter gave me more confidence that the choices in typography, color balance, contrast, and whitespace our teams arrived at through much effort have been correct and beneficial ones.

A different kind of user interface design book

This book is different from most books on designing user interfaces since the ideas are presented as design patterns, much as you would see in Gamma's classic book on the subject had it been adapted to human-computer interfacing rather than programming. Each of the patterns and techniques presented in this book are intended to help the reader solve common design problems. Patterns and techniques are presented for web sites, desktop applications, and everything in between such as web forms, Flash, and applets. The user interface design patterns presented in this book are intended to be read by people who have some knowledge of UI design concepts and terminology: dialogs, selection, combo boxes, navigation bars, whitespace, branding, and so on. The book does not identify many widely-accepted techniques such as copy-and-paste, as it is assumed that you probably already know what this is. However, some common techniques are described here to encourage their use in other contexts -- for instance, desktop apps could make better use of Toplevel Navigation -- or to discuss them alongside alternative solutions. If you're running short on ideas, or hung up on a difficult design problem, skimming this book and its design patterns may help you produce a good solution. Each pattern is presented with an image showing a possible implementation, a "Use When" section, a "Why" section, and a "How" section with very high level tool-independent implementation instructions. The patterns are organized into groups by function - organizing content, getting around, organizing the page, getting input from users, showing complex data, commands and action, direct manipulation, and stylistic elements. I would highly recommend this logically structured book to anyone from programmer to graphic artist who might be involved in user interface design.