Editor’s Pick

There are few more books we’ve come across over the last years. The ones listed below turned out to be life-savers and provided useful insights into the field of user interface design. The bottleneck is, however, that some of them aren’t that easy to read and require both patience and some prior knowledge in the field of HCI.

11. Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction by Jenny Preece, Yvonne Rogers and Helen Shar
ISBN: 978-0471492788

Interaction Design from the academic point of view. This book comprises 15 densely packed chapters that integrate all of the various cognitive, social, and other issues that are germane to interaction design. The book provides a comprehensive look at the entire set of requirements involved with design. The authors show that there is much more to systems design than end-user requirements and CGI scripts. Effective HCI is a multi-disciplinary area including psychology, sociology, anthropology, information systems, and computer science. Highly recommendable for more advanced and sophisticated insights into the area of interaction design.

12. The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems by Jef Raskin
ISBN: 978-0201379372

“The book that explains why you really hate computers.” This book is sometimes quite hard to read and not that easy to understand as the author literally dives in into the cognitive nature of human beings. However the book is very appealing and thought-provoking. Falling somewhere between Norman’s The Psychology of Everyday Things and Shneiderman’s Designing the User Interface, Raskin’s book covers ergonomics as well as quantification, evaluation, and navigation. Raskin was the original creator of the Apple Macintosh project before Steve Jobs took over and has a background in technology and art, which gives him a unique perspective on usability.

13. Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction by Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant
ISBN: 978-0321269782

This book, which is often considered as “the bible of UI”, provides a comprehensive introduction to the field of human-computer interaction. Struggling through sometimes rather complex choice of words, you learn practical principles and guidelines needed to develop high quality interface designs — ones that users can understand, predict, and control. It covers theoretical foundations, and design processes such as expert reviews and usability testing.

The book contains numerous examples of direct manipulation, menu selection, and form fill-in: chapters have examples from cell phones, consumer electronics, desktop displays, and Web interfaces.

14. Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology by Jonas Löwgren, Erik Stolterman
ISBN: 78-0262122719

The authors of Thoughtful Interaction Design go beyond the usual technical concerns of usability and usefulness to consider interaction design from a design perspective. The shaping of digital artifacts is a design process that influences the form and functions of workplaces, schools, communication, and culture; the successful interaction designer must use both ethical and aesthetic judgment to create designs that are appropriate to a given environment. This book is not a how-to manual, but a collection of tools for thought about interaction design.