Designing User Interfaces is a difficult thing, as there is no clear, cheap and fast way to test if an UI meets the needs of users. Over the last decades, many companies attempted various approaches to UI, and a few ‘patterns’ have emerged. Those patterns have tremendous power, as most users know them.
This is where Designing Interfaces kicks in. The book is a catalogue of different patterns grouped into categories by their usage. Each pattern is explained, then a few usage models from real-life applications are shown.
In addition, the book contains a few chapters about user interaction and about ‘design’ and aesthetics. While those chapters cannot replace dedicated classes on any of the subjects, the information given is enough to get you heading into a good direction!
The text is easy to read, there is very little technical jargon. The well-written descriptions the descriptions are well written and come to the point.
O’Reilly really did a great job with the page layout. The pages are colorful, and the images are printed in a very high resolution. While this probably is not what one expects from a tech book, I found it very useful actually:
Overall, this book is a great (one-time)read if you do UI design. While most of the concepts will at least be familiar, the presentation given lets you put the thoughts into the right context!
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I’m wondering why all these O’Reilly books have animal drawing from the beginning of the 20th century on them
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