This week I picked my way in and out of three books about user interfaces. Ranging from the conceptual to the practical, these volumes cover just about all I need to begin prototyping a new interface I am creating for my school.
When reading technical publications I always start with the forward or introduction before diving into the nuts and bolts of the text. I like to know where the author is coming from philosophically before the heavy information takes over.
I’ll share a passage from the opening pages of each book that helped inform my purchases, and ultimately my buy-in to the authors take on GUI design.
From About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design:
Interaction design has also shown its power as a marketing tool, communicating with great clarity and specificity about exactly whom will be using the product and why. Getting to the root of customer motivations is manna for marketers… (Cooper, 2007, p. xxiii)
From Effective UI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software:
User experience is, as the name suggests, the experience a user has when interacting with software. Just as is the case with music, a software product’s UX falls somewhere along a range between subjectively good and subjectively bad. (Anderson, McRee & Wilson, 2010, p. 4)
From Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design:
But it’s still not easy to design good interfaces. Let’s say you’re not a trained or self-taught interface designer. If you just use the UI toolkits the way they should be used, and if you follow the various style guides or imitate existing applications, you can probably create a mediocre but passable interface. (Tidwell, 2005, p. xi)
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