Overview
The cleverest code in the world is worth nothing if a program's interface proves an unwieldy barrier to users. That's why programmers and designers alike will benefit from About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design. Here, respected software designer Alan Cooper shares his own real-world experience and design principles so that you, too, can fashion intuitive, effective user interfaces. Applicable to multimedia and Web sites as well as application software, About Face is an invaluable resource for design professionals.
This book expresses the intangibles of interface design with clarity and practical functionality. Cooper combines tactical and strategic tools, allowing you to create user interface features, while also experiencing as a user world. The edict here is to understand the user`s goals along with the applications and the technology. Subjects covered include windows, files, platforms, mouse, drag & drop, menus and dialog boxes. You`ll also study sequence of commands, toolbars and undo functions. An interesting section discusses flow, orchestration (creating a coherent interface) and "modeless feedback." In modeless feedback, information is built into the interface in a seamless fashion; there is no dialog box barging in, interrupting activities.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Fatbrain Review
This book expresses the intangibles of interface design with clarity and practical functionality. Cooper combines tactical and strategic tools, allowing you to create user interface features, while also experiencing as a user world. The edict here is to understand the user`s goals along with the applications and the technology. Subjects covered include windows, files, platforms, mouse, drag & drop, menus and dialog boxes. You`ll also study sequence of commands, toolbars and undo functions. An interesting section discusses flow, orchestration (creating a coherent interface) and "modeless feedback." In modeless feedback, information is built into the interface in a seamless fashion; there is no dialog box barging in, interrupting activities.Ray Duncan
Designing Programs The Microsoft-Centric Way
Alan Cooper has a legendary status among Windows programmers. This is due partly to his talents as a writer and speaker, partly to his somewhat murky reputation as the "Father of Visual Basic," and partly to the widespread perception that he beat Microsoft at their own game, then cashed in and walked away without a scratch. Rather than sit in his gazebo and clip coupons from his Microsoft stock, however, Cooper has chosen to put his fame as a user interface guru on the line in About Face.
The first thirteen chapters of About Face address global issues: programmers' versus users' mental models of program operation and file systems, what Cooper refers to as program "posture," and the application's facilitation of workflow (or impedance of same). The middle set of chapters deal with relatively low level, technical aspects of application "affordances" -- buttons, menus, cursors, dialog boxes, and so on. The last seven chapters return to more philosophical musings on errors, exception handling, installation, personalization, "undo" facilities, and the future of user interfaces.
Cooper has a lot of valuable things to say about program design and behavior. His comments on sovereign as opposed to transient programs, the evolving role of menus in the era of toolbars, nested and tabbed dialogs, drag-and-drop, and the tendency of most commercial applications to "go stupid" without warning for unpredictable lengths of time were interesting and thought-provoking. I particularly enjoyed his railings against the many idiotic applications which provide unbounded controls for user input, and then immediately turn around and slap the user's wrist for entering an illegal value.
Although About Face is subtitled "The Essentials of User Interface Design," it is really about "The Essentials of Windows Application User Interface Design." The book does mention the Apple Macintosh and the Xerox Star in passing, but I get the impression that Cooper's experience with alternative modern GUIs such as OS/2 Warp, Macintosh OS, NextStep, and the UNIX variants is minimal. Certainly Cooper's perspective comes across in the book as quite parochial, and he passes up many opportunities to compare and contrast Windows features with their (often superior) counterparts in other systems.
Other weaknesses of the book include Cooper's widespread use of self-invented, idiosyncratic terms for user-interface issues and objects, wide swings in technical level, and the apparent absence of a strong manuscript editor. But the Windows-95 orientation will probably have the most serious effect on the book's long-term value. Even before the majority of PC-compatible users have switched from Windows 3.1 to Windows-95, Microsoft is preparing to jettison the Windows-95 interface in favor of a new Web-browser-based metaphor.
With typical IDG hyperbole, About Face's cover blurb quotes Stewart Alsop as saying "Alan Cooper is a software god... This is a landmark book." That's stretching things a bit for my taste; my conception of a software god runs more to the likes of Donald Knuth, and of landmarks more to the likes of Donald Norman's Design of Everyday Things. This is a good book, and certainly light-years better than Microsoft's own pathetic little application style guides (which are conspicuously ignored by Microsoft programmers), but it would need a broader base and some stringent editing to be a great one.--Dr. Dobb's Electronic Review of Computer Books