User Interface Design and Evaluation (Interactive Technologies)

User Interface Design and Evaluation provides an overview of the user-centered design field. It illustrates the benefits of a user-centered approach to the design of software, computer systems, and websites.

The book provides clear and practical discussions of requirements gathering, developing interaction design from user requirements, and user interface evaluation. The book's coverage includes established HCI topics--for example, visibility, affordance, feedback, metaphors, mental models, and the like--combined with practical guidelines for contemporary designs and current trends, which makes for a winning combination. It provides a clear presentation of ideas, illustrations of concepts, using real-world applications. This book will help readers develop all the skills necessary for iterative user-centered design, and provides a firm foundation for user interface design and evaluation on which to build.

It is ideal for seasoned professionals in user interface design and usability engineering (looking for new tools with which to expand their knowledge); new people who enter the HCI field with no prior educational experience; and software developers, web application developers, and information appliance designers who need to know more about interaction design and evaluation.

“User Interface Design and Evaluation is comprehensive and clear. It’s an amazing achievement – a textbook in plain English that works both for the classroom and for practitioners learning on their own. It covers the entire user-centered design process with details on the steps and techniques for requirements gathering, design, and evaluation. It includes great stories and case studies as well as engaging exercises. This is a superb book that puts all the pieces together.
― Ginny Redish, Redish & Associates, Inc.

“What makes this book unique is its blend of traditional HCI concepts and contemporary guidelines as well as its inclusion of practical pointers for acceptance of user-centered design. Unlike other HCI books, this text is generally succinct and to the point. Yet beyond being an excellent reference, it also includes very good practical examples, e.g., design of GUI, Web, and embedded systems are especially useful. The book’s coverage of traditional HCI notions (e.g., visibility, affordance, feedback, metaphors, mental models, and the like), combined with practical guidelines to contemporary designs (e.g., GUIs, Web) ranks this work among the best in the field, particularly well suited as a textbook for students in a HCI class.
― Andrew Duchowski, Clemson University

“The entire UI design process is presented in this text with an effective blend of theory and practice. The authors do a fine job of presenting “classic HCI foundations and current trends in UI design. The authors have a keen knack for using interesting and practical demonstrations, examples, and exercises to reinforce key concepts. The strength of this text is the step-by-step “how-to-do-usability guidance provided throughout the text. This book will motivate the reader to want to immediately “jump on the UI design bandwagon and to get started on the business of attending to users in UI design.
― Laurie P. Dringus, Nova Southeastern University

“This text provides a solid introduction to current thought and practices in User Interface Design and Evaluation. The authors provide a logical structure for the highly iterative work of UI Design, and the book is organized to support classroom presentation and discussion. This text can be a valuable resource for students of UI Design and Evaluation, as well as for technical and management professionals interested in an introduction to the field.
― Karl Steiner, Ph.D. Usability Manager, UGS

“While reading the review copy of this book, I actually felt guilty about having taught so many HCI courses with the existing well-known textbooks. This book offers much more of the sort of material that students yearn for but find too little of in existing textbooks: extensive, concrete, and realistic advice and examples about how to proceed while designing and evaluating user interfaces. With a steady stream of brief examples and some longer case studies; with “how-to-do-it advice and worked-out solutions to problems, the student is constantly confronted with -- and guided through -- the multifaceted real world of user interface design. The book also contains the material that we are accustomed to finding in HCI textbooks: presentation of well-known HCI concepts, principles, results, and methods. This material is woven together with the more concrete, practical information in a creative way that enhances the appreciation of both types of content.
― Anthony Jameson, Professor, International University in Germany and Principal Researcher at DFKI,the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence

“The book features many elements that make the process of user interface development real. Plenty of examples show when and where user interface development has failed and how those failures might have been mitigated. Additionally, the plethora of exercises challenges you to think about the principles and theories explained, along with the practice.
Graphically, the book features terrific examples of low-fidelity process documents through finished products. There are full-color illustrations along with instruction on how to use color well, and plenty of tables, boxes, and figures that further enhance the text.
There is an incredible amount of information in this book. If you are involved in developing user interfaces, it is the best start for your journey.
― Elisa Kaplan Miller, Technical Communications, November 2005