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Recently I have been reading a lot of books about interaction design, prototyping and negotiations and one book in particular Designing Interactions, by Bill Moggridge is a absorbing read, especially if you want to read about the pioneers of User Interfaces and devices as well as the various techniques they use. You name a pivotal person in the field of Computer interaction and the book covers them and their crowning achievements. There are also a lot of places where Smalltalk is mentioned. Oh how much we owe to that time and that language.

To give you a taste I’ll quote the section that interviews Bill Verplank who drove interaction design to new levels during his work at Xerox from 1978 to 1986 on the Xerox Star graphical user interface. I like this section in particular because it draws out what an interaction designer is all about. Even if you have a passing interest in interaction design, I think this book is worth getting.

From the book:

Bill says that the interaction designer has three questions to answer; they are all “How do you…?” questions.

1. “How do you do?”

How do you affect the world? A human, a person that we are designing for, does something, and we provide affordances. We either present handles that they can continuously control, or we give them buttons for discrete control, pressing the button and giving up control to the machine. When you are designing the way people act, there is a choice between handles and buttons. You can grab hold of a handle and manipulate it, keeping control as you do it. Alternatively you can push a button, or click one, delegating control to the machine.

2. “How do you feel?”

How do you get feedback? McLuhan made the distinction between what he called “fuzzy,” or “cool,” media and “distinct,” or “hot,” media. Early TV was a cool medium, with its fuzzy images. Cool media draw you in. A book with careful printing or a gravestone with carved lettering is hot, or immutable–you cannot touch or change it. We design the way that the machine, or system, gives feedback to the user, or the book looks to the user, or the sign communicates. That’s where a lot of feelings come from; a lot of our emotions about the world come from sensory qualities of those media that we present things with.

3. “How do you know?”

As we design products with computers in them, it is very difficult for a user to know exactly what they are going to do. A map gives the knowledge that you may need if you are designing complex systems. A path offers a kind of understanding that is more about skill and doing the right thing at the right moment. It is the responsibility if the designer to help people understand what is happening by showing them a map or a path. The map shows the user an overview of how everything works, and the path shows them what to do, what they need to know moment by moment.

This section continues to build upon this by talking about Interaction Design Paradigms and Process and ends with a good example of applying these.

This is just one of many inspiring sections that let you get into the mind of the people who created the tools and interfaces we use today.

I’ve just read “designing the obvious, a common sense approach to web application design” by Robert Hoekman, Jr. and it’s fantastic. I wish I had read this book much earlier in my career and I would have made much better UI’s. This book is a must read.

Robert goes through what makes an obvious design with some good examples but what is great about his book is that he then continues on with how to apply some rules to your designs to make them obvious.  Most of the books I have read on the UI stop after the rhetoric on what is not good about UI’s this one doesn’t which makes it stand out from the crowd.

Robert discusses the qualities of a great application and then how to turn those qualities into goals. “To create software that does the following:

1. Conforms to the way users interact with the web, but focuses on the activity instead of a specific audience.
2. Has only those features that are absolutely necessary for users to complete the activity the application is meant to support.
3. Supports the user’s mental model of what it does.
4. Helps users get started quickly so they can become intermediate users as soon as possible.
5. Makes it easy for users to recover from mistakes and difficult to make them in the first place.
6. Has uniformly designed interface elements, but leverages irregularity to create meaning and importance.
7. Reduces clutter to a minimum.

”

The remaining eight (8) chapters expand on a framework for obvious design, with some real gems of advice and examples. I’d be very surprised if you bought this book and were disappointed with your purchase. If your designing UI’s and Web based UI’s in particular then please get and read this book.

So you know what to expect, the remaining chapter titles are:

• Understand Users, Then Ignore Them
• Build Only What Is Absolutely Necessary
• Support the User’s Mental Model
• Turn Beginners Into Intermediates, Immediately
• Handle Errors Wisely
• Design for Uniformity, Consistency and Meaning.
• Reduce and Refine
• Don’t Innovate When You Can Elevate

Bulletproof Web Design, Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS by Dan Cederholm is a book I bought and read after looking for such a book and reading the review on it by Simon Harris.

The Inmates Are Running The Asylum, Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper (SAMS).
The title says it all really. Ever entered data and tried to continue on with the computer telling you that you can’t enter one of the values you entered? Did this frustrate you and make you wonder if the computer was really helping you? If so or if your into Interface Design then this book is for you.

The Humane Interface, New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems, Jef Raskin (Addison Wesley) is a must have book if interface design is of interest to you. The creator of the Apple Macintosh. Jef is the master.

Designing Interfaces, Patterns for Effective Interaction Design by Jenifer Tidwell

I often pick this book up to double check for the most appropriate interface and interface elements to use in my projects. It’s very clear and well written with lot of real world examples and screen shots.