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Designing the User Interface
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Author: Ben Shneiderman
List Price: $80.00
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0201694972
Publisher: Pearson Addison Wesley (15 July, 1997)
Edition: Hardcover
Sales Rank: 83,838
Average Customer Rating: 4.11 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 2 out of 5
A Verbose Syllabus
This is more of a syllabus with references than an actual textbook. It's even a sensible syllabus; if you want an outline of the important topics in contemporary and historical computer user interfaces, Shneiderman's book will tell you what you need to know. But the utility of this book is unclear; it's not intended to teach the reader how to design interfaces, nor does it teach experimental design and evaluation. At 600+ pages, it's both terse and verbose. Verbose, because of the "let me tell you what I'm going to tell you, tell you, tell you what I've told you" format favored in this kind of overview. Terse because the "tell you" part is a kind of white-washed summary; as soon as a topic is brought up, several references are trotted out, summarized in one or two lines, and then dismissed. I wanted more depth, more case studies, and a higher-level vantage point. Despite a short tour of command lines, including natural language text commands, and a 10 page summary of speech recognition and synthesis-based interfaces, "Designing the User Interface" is almost exclusively about contemporary computer graphical user interface design. Better books on GUI design include Johnson's "GUI Bloopers" and Raskin's "The Humane Interface".
Rating: 5 out of 5
Great Shneiderman ideas but...
Overall it's a great book but the "Object-Action Model" proposed in the book lacks experimental results. May be he can considering include that in the next edition.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Foundation book for HCI
I have all three editions of Designing the User Interface and have used the principles described in them for years. This is that book that describes the 'three pillars of successful user-interface development' 1.) Guidelines Documents & Process, 2.) User Interface Software Tools, and 3.) Expert Reviews & Usability Testing. It also defines acceptance testing in terms of the user (time to learn specific functions, speed of task performance, rate of errors, retention of commands, subjective satisfaction). And provides the guiding principles for good user interface (e.g. direct manipulation). One of the most interesting areas covered is the information visualization strategy that implements dynamic visualization using direct manipulation. The mantra of 'overview, zoom and filter, then details on demand' should be wallpaper on the screens of software developers producing data presentation displays. This book is about strategies for effective human-computer interface. It includes guidelines, but it's not a cookbook of things to do to get there. That these strategies and guidelines are not generally adopted and applied is evidenced by the many poor user interfaces currently available. (I once spent an incredible amount of time totally frustrated simply trying to move from the home page of one of the largest electronic manufacturers in Europe.) This is a text book and its organization is biased toward academia, with many references to other works and a text book style. Each chapter ends with a researcher's agenda and practitioner's summary, but still practitioner's may complain that the book is too theoretical. To them I would comment that 'there is nothing so useful as a good theory', and check out [...] for examples of the results of applying the ideas in the book. Ben Shneiderman is one of the legends of HCI and his work includes core principles for the discipline. This book is a must have for all serious students of human-computer interaction and provides an important foundation for developers of user interfaces.
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