Fit Associates | marc@fitassociates.com
New York Times | alex@agwright.com
November + December 2009
interactions
You remember how it all started, right? People who were designing interfaces said, “Our scope is bigger than the interface. This stuff is dynamic. It’s conversational. We are Interaction Designers!” A few years went by, and the industry started to internalize this perspective. Older terms like “interface design” and “usability” gave way to terms like “user experience” and “experience design.” Around the same time, some people started calling for integrated design, an approach recognizing the interdependency of business, technology, interface, interaction, content, and so on—all legitimate targets of a design approach, all necessary for making good things.
As our field has evolved—through an ongoing cross-pollination of disciplines and practices—so too has our literature. But sometimes design rhetoric has soared a little too far above the day-to-day lives of many designers. Hyperbolic theories of design often leave designers ill-equipped to translate those theories into tactical decisions. Perhaps sensing this gap, several authors have issued new books in recent months that try to bridge the gap between modern design theory and practice.
Shneiderman and Plaisant’s Designing the User Interface, now in its fifth edition, aspires to be an authoritative textbook on the practice of interface design. That term may sound outmoded, but as the conversation about how to do good work has progressed over the years, the practical challenges of hands-on interface design have not gone away. In fact, interface design has only gotten more difficult. And today’s self-described experience designers would probably do well to reacquaint themselves with the foundational work of decades past. Fortunately, the authors of this seminal text have seen fit to update the book over the years, working to give us an evolving picture of these core practices.
Over the course of 500 pages, Designing the User Interface provides readers with a comprehensive survey of the subject, divided into four sections:
Section one provides a sound introduction to usability, with a fundamental set of guidelines and principles. This short, 50-page section documents guidelines such as “minimize memory load on the user,” “use up to four standard colors,” and “the format of data-entry information should be linked closely to the format of displayed information.” Section two covers development processes, with two chapters on managing design processes and evaluating interface designs. Section three addresses interaction styles, with separate chapters for direct manipulation and virtual environments, menus and forms, command and natural languages, interaction devices (mice, keyboards, game controllers, etc.), and collaboration and social media. Finally, section four addresses design issues, with chapters on quality of service (e.g., response time), balancing function and fashion, documentation and help, information search, and information visualization.
The book succeeds as a thorough survey of the field but nonetheless feels incomplete as an instructional text. It’s great if you want to ingest a lot of knowledge about software interfaces, but it does not equip you to do interface design. This is not a how-to book, nor was it seemingly intended to be one. Professors preparing an HCI course would be wise to refer to Designing the User Interface, and may choose to assign relevant chapters as readings. But without supplemental material from other sources, no section on its own provides enough material to prepare a student to do the work of interface design. The writing hovers in the middle ground, providing neither the real details necessary for practice, nor an integrating high-level framework. (A set of online materials for both readers and instructors is available through the book’s companion website: http://wps.aw.com/aw_shneiderman_dtui_5. This includes PowerPoint presentations for use in class, and answers to discussion questions. )
This is not so much a criticism of the book or its
authors, but rather a comment on the book’s overall
References:
Archives