EDITOR Alex Wright alex@agwright.com

objective. Think of Designing the User Interface as a snapshot of issues in (mostly) graphical user interface design as it currently exists—a catalog of topics and ideas related to software interfaces. It provides a springboard for discussion and serves as a reminder to readers about what they need to learn.

For example, in a section on usability testing we discover that testing can be conducted in a lab or not, that we may need to run our test design by an Institutional Review Board, that there is something called the think-aloud technique, that there are lots of kinds of usability testing, and that there is a NIST standard for what usability reports look like. There are also references to lots of other published material. In either a course or an industry situation, this would be helpful as an overview, but would certainly not prepare us to plan and complete a test. We expect that experienced practitioners will find this broad but shallow approach more frustrating than useful.

The fifth edition of Designing the User Interface appears at a time when our community’s body of learning and practice reflect a long conversation about what is meant by the word “design,” and what knowledge and skills are necessary for its practice. The past few decades have seen a marriage between the worlds of design, technology, business, social research, and (for lack of a better term) content creation. That marriage has born children: bodies of knowledge and practice that draw from their parents but seem to be something new in the world (as one example, the way that network technologies mingle with social dynamics and markets).

Through all this marrying and childbearing, we still need to design good interfaces, and we still need good texts to help us learn. While reading the updated Designing the User Interface, one comes away with the sense of having been a guest at a wedding who never got to dance at the reception.

There has long been a hole in the literature for a how-to book that mixes rigor with practicality, offers process without prescribing an artificially narrow path, speaks from a sophisticated understanding of the work of design, describes ways to integrate multiple disciplines, and embraces the fact that design practice is a social practice. Bill Buxton’s fun and useful book, Sketching User Interfaces, qualifies on most points but does not cover all of the territory between product concept and product launch. Kim Goodwin does, however, in Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-

Designing the User Interface, Fifth Edition Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant Addison-Wesley, 2009 / $98.00

Experience Design 1. 1 Nathan Shedroff 2009 / $25.00

November + December 2009

Designing for the Digital
Age: How to Create
Human-Centered
Products and Services
Kim Goodwin
Wiley, 2009 / $69.99