Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design

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Editorial Reviews:

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.

Customer Reviews: Read 42 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

A different kind of user interface design book December 4, 2005
125 out of 130 found this review helpful

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.

5 out of 5 stars

Widgets and aesthetics December 21, 2005
79 out of 83 found this review helpful

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.

2 out of 5 stars

I learned virtually nothing. August 3, 2006
75 out of 97 found this review helpful

There is little (if any) content in here that an intermediate or senior level designer could use. Most of what is in this book is obvious (and if it's not maybe this shouldn't be your line of work). It was a painful read because most of the time I felt like I was wasting my time. I was (I kid you not) already more than halfway through the book when she started talking about using alternating colors to visually distinguish rows of data. Ya, duh? And she is verbose about the most obvious of things, to the point where it's almost hard to read because you think maybe you're missing something, and so you get someone else to read it too and they go, "Huh, didn't she just say the exact same thing in the last sentence but just with different words?" Yes, she did. It's irksome. It's irritating. It's annoying. (See what I mean?) This is a hot dog of a book - all filler.

This might be a good book for a novice, but I wouldn't recommend it for someone who is well into the industry, as you will probably just wish you could get that time back.

The only good thing about it is that you will learn the vocabulary of the industry. It's like a fluffed up data dictionary, that's all. I don't recommend it unless you have time to waste. It's nicely designed though.

3 out of 5 stars

WEB DESIGN IS DIFFERENT FROM BOOK DESIGN June 19, 2006
25 out of 47 found this review helpful

Jenifer Tidwell's book is excellent, both for its organization and information content. It is indeed unfortunate that the book's designers had so little experience designing books.
From a design viewpoint, their visual structure is well done. However, the choice of an expanded sans serif type, coupled with a 6.5 inch line length makes for poor, difficult readability. The readability standard for line length is 1 1/2 to 2 lengths of the chosen alphabet. In addition, although the book's paper has a matt gloss finish, it is still reflective under a reading lamp, adding to the lack of ease in reading.

I find it interesting that a book that dwells so well on aspects of the various patterns that can be used for good web sites ranks so poorly in the text that describes it. As far back as the 1950's, people like Miles Tinker researched and wrote extensively on what today might be called "patterns for print readability." To find it so ignored in this otherwise excellent text makes me rank it far lower on the scale than it otherwise deserves.

Other books that O'Reilly has published such as Information Architecture for the World Wide Web use an easy to read serif type, and a paper stock that is non-relective under a desk lamp. For a less flashy design, but one that is much more reader-friendly regarding ease of reading the content, look at The Design of Sites, published by Addison Wesley.

Print is still around, and although it is not as compelling an area for new book design as the Web is, good readable design for print still matters.

5 out of 5 stars

Not just for designers... November 9, 2006
23 out of 23 found this review helpful

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.

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