Designing the User Interface

Rating:
Summary: Good user interface guide but not necessarily for the web
Review: A text search of Amazon.com using 'User Interface' returns this book as the first choice. So I bought it. I also thought Schneiderman would be a good case study because people who bought his book also bought Jakob Nielsen's Usability Engineering. I just hoped after 638 pages I wouldn't be left with the conclusion, "I like top navigation and left-side navigation."

This book is presented as a textbook and some people may have a problem with this approach. The fact is most of the people studying User Interface are PhDs and they need to sell these things to their students so they can continue making their bar tab in the faculty lounge.

'Designing the User Interface' covers as much human-computer interaction as you could hope to fit in a textbook. You may be left wondering why anyone would bother writing a book about the same subject again. It's already covered. Unfortunately, most of the textbook will be too 'academic' for our purposes. If you want to know about computer science, psychology, information science, business systems, education technology, communications arts, media studies, technical writing, research agendas, you'll find it. But just flip to the obvious throw-in Chapter 16, titled: hypermedia and the worldwide web on page 551. That's what I did. In fact, the other obvious throw-in titled 'Afterward' has some great sections such as 'Ten Plagues of the Information Age' and 'Between Hope and Fear.' Shneiderman waxes philosophical here on the big picture of human-computer interaction. He covers subjects such as universal access, fear of technology, professional responsibilities, alienation, unemployment and displacement.

My personal viewpoint is that text is much a part of user interface as graphics and navigation. Unclear text makes it just as hard for a user to interpret a site as mauve navigation buttons on a brown background. So why do User Interface experts present sentences such as:

"In the last 40 years, the cathode ray tube (CRT), often called the visual display unit (VDU) or tube (VDT), has emerged as an alternate medium for presenting text, but researchers have only begun the long process of optimization (Cakir et al., 1980; Grandjean and Vigliani, 1982; Heines, 1984; Helander, 1987; Hansen and Haas, 1988; Oborne and Holton, 1988, Creed and Newstead, 1988, Horton, 1990) to meet user needs." (Page 412)?

Yikers! That's hard to read. Where's the usability in that sentence?

Schneiderman takes an obvious academic approach to Chapter 16. He starts off with the history of the web going back to the 1940s. Don't ask. Then we learn what hypertext is. I think we know where this is going. There is, however, a great photo of Sophia Loren wearing a bathing suit circa. 1955.

He analyzes task-oriented and metaphor-oriented design. This is a good thing because we seem hooked on metaphors without looking at tasks. Perhaps tasks are obvious to us. Maybe task-oriented design means usability But then you have to bring in intuitive response and that opens a whole can of worms.

The pages between 575 and 579 cover general design themes such as clustering, sequencing, navigation and usability testing. They're probably the five most important pages in the book.

Another good section of the book is chapter four. It covers user acceptance testing and offers a great sample assessment survey on page 136. I'd be very interested in running this survey on some of our sites as a test.

I don't want to say the rest of the book isn't valuable to us - it is. It just isn't necessary. Most of it deals in theories predating the web -- possibly predating the mouse.

Shneiderman offers a website companion to the book . It's jam packed with updates, study guides and errata such as: "Page 486, first line Gertude should be Gertrude." At least he's trying to practice what he preaches. But how can I fault a man who's Honorary Doctorate of Science comes from my alma Mata?

Rating:
Summary: An excellent revision
Review: As most reviewers have noted, this is a classic and must-have book in the field of HCI. This fourth edition--newly published in March 2004--has been thoroughly revised to include much material related to the WWW. It does appear that Shneiderman took care to go through each chapter and remove less relevant material in favor of including new topics that have come up since the last edition was written.

Rating:
Summary: A Must Have
Review: Designing the User Interface is the must have in matter of Graphic User Interface. The book provides lots of stragies regarding GUI implementation, How to avoid common problems, and is full of examples. It covers almost every possible topics. But, as Web Designer, It lacks a lot on this matter. I would have love to see more about it. Maybe the next edition. Despite this, It is a book that every designer, programmer should have.

Rating:
Summary: Foundation book for HCI
Review: I have all three editions of Designing the User Interface and have used the principles described in them for years. This is that book that describes the 'three pillars of successful user-interface development' 1.) Guidelines Documents & Process, 2.) User Interface Software Tools, and 3.) Expert Reviews & Usability Testing. It also defines acceptance testing in terms of the user (time to learn specific functions, speed of task performance, rate of errors, retention of commands, subjective satisfaction). And provides the guiding principles for good user interface (e.g. direct manipulation). One of the most interesting areas covered is the information visualization strategy that implements dynamic visualization using direct manipulation. The mantra of 'overview, zoom and filter, then details on demand' should be wallpaper on the screens of software developers producing data presentation displays.

This book is about strategies for effective human-computer interface. It includes guidelines, but it's not a cookbook of things to do to get there. That these strategies and guidelines are not generally adopted and applied is evidenced by the many poor user interfaces currently available. (I once spent an incredible amount of time totally frustrated simply trying to move from the home page of one of the largest electronic manufacturers in Europe.)

This is a text book and its organization is biased toward academia, with many references to other works and a text book style. Each chapter ends with a researcher's agenda and practitioner's summary, but still practitioner's may complain that the book is too theoretical. To them I would comment that 'there is nothing so useful as a good theory', and check out [...] for examples of the results of applying the ideas in the book.

Ben Shneiderman is one of the legends of HCI and his work includes core principles for the discipline. This book is a must have for all serious students of human-computer interaction and provides an important foundation for developers of user interfaces.

Rating:
Summary: It's not really a book, but a collection of disparate words.
Review: I'm using this book in one of my college courses in a computer science master's program. This is my third master's degree, so I've been through a lot of books.

This book ranks among the worst books I've ever come across for any purpose.

While the book itself is a beautiful production, no doubt the publisher/editor put significant work into preparing the book, the main purpose, transmitting information on designing user interfaces to the reader, falls flat. It gets two stars for the work the publisher put into it.

The author apparently didn't pick up that a book is a user interface too.

Is it a reference book? Well, when I try to use it this way, I must search for up to 15 or twenty minutes, either to find many references to the topic, or in order to realize the topic isn't covered. So I grade it poor for reference. Also, most topics are so scattered, you would have to read the book through several times to gain the information required, but the book is so unreadable, that you'll never get to this point.

Is it a literature review? One could easily confuse the book for this as there are hundreds of references to various papers and publications all through the book. Several chapters are written in such a style that it goes from a paragraph from one paper, into a paragraph from another and so on (check out p. 128 for example, or p. 389, or randomly open to nearly any page). By reading any chapter completely you are left with a melange of disparate and unconnected thoughts about many different aspects of user interfaces, most that have nothing much to do with design or with one another. Here the author must be trying to soothe his own insecurity that he has enough knowledge to write a book about UI. Unfortunately, while I believe the author has ample knowledge, he lacks ability in conveying information to a reader.

Is it a text book? Only if the goal is to steer the reader away with the belief that designing user interfaces is too difficult for anyone except the author, who you should hire for consulting, or for others who have read through hundreds of papers. It's not even good to go to sleep by, because you just get upset reading it due to the poor and illogical layout.

Is it a book to introduce you to design tools? No! There is a chapter titled, "Software Tools" but it tries to cover everything briefly, but ends up covering nothing in enough detail to allow you to make a decision on which tool would fill your needs.

The book just disgusts me. It is hard to read even two or three pages in a row because the author's writing style is so cryptic. Yet in other places it just plain wastes your time, for instance in describing what a menu is for ... from p. 237, "The primary goal for menu, form-fillin, and dialog-box designers is to create sensible, comprehensible, memorable, and convenient organization relevant to the user's tasks." WELL DUH!

That bit of the text is indicative of the whole book, only it's probably a little easier to read than most sentences. Here is another snippet from p. 389, Ch. 11 Presentation Styles: "In a study of 12 telephone operators, Springer (1987) found that supressing the presentation of redundant family names in a directory-assistance listing reduced target-location time by 0.8 seconds."

Hey, I'd like to believe the author isn't stupid, but the whole chapter is filled with jibberish like that, and it doesn't have much to do with presenation style. The whole book is just like that. It's worthless.

I realize every time I pick up this book, I'm about to waste my time, but I hope I haven't wasted your time with this review.

Rating:
Summary: Another high quality Shneiderman textbook...
Review: Now in its third printing, this book has served the students and practitioners of user interface designs for almost a generation. The book covers virtually every aspect of HCI and provides a comprehensive set of discussions regarding alternative presentation styles, different types of interaction devices, acceptable response times, windows management strategies, social impacts, and much more. Those readers familiar with Shneiderman's work will appreciate the extensive amount of real-world experience (with supportive examples) that has gone into producing such a book. For me, the most important revisions to this edition are his discussions on information visualization. - a mainstream HDI (human data interface) technique which is clearly presented in Chapter 15. This book is a staple and a "must have" for those involved with designing user interfaces.

Rating:
Summary: Great Shneiderman ideas but...
Review: Overall it's a great book but the "Object-Action Model" proposed in the book lacks experimental results. May be he can considering include that in the next edition.

Rating:
Summary: Great Shneiderman ideas but...
Review: Overall it's a great book but the "Object-Action Model" proposed in the book lacks experimental results. May be he can considering include that in the next edition.

Rating:
Summary: Verbosity at its finest
Review: This book looks more like a collection of references than a real text book. The author inserts references to other works and papers in such a random and repetitive fashion that makes reading the book a real pain in the ass.

And then there is the verbosity. Apparently, Mr Shneiderman likes to list items and give examples. And he likes it a lot. If you make the terrible mistake of reading this book you will navigate through never-ending paragraphs that make circles and circles around the same idea, giving pointless examples of an anyways pretty obvious concept.

This book is really bad. It looks like the author just copy-pasted the contents of his course slides and inserted some pretty pictures in the middle. Don't waste your money and/or your time with this one.

Rating:
Summary: A Verbose Syllabus
Review: This is more of a syllabus with references than an actual textbook. It's even a sensible syllabus; if you want an outline of the important topics in contemporary and historical computer user interfaces, Shneiderman's book will tell you what you need to know. But the utility of this book is unclear; it's not intended to teach the reader how to design interfaces, nor does it teach experimental design and evaluation.

At 600+ pages, it's both terse and verbose. Verbose, because of the "let me tell you what I'm going to tell you, tell you, tell you what I've told you" format favored in this kind of overview. Terse because the "tell you" part is a kind of white-washed summary; as soon as a topic is brought up, several references are trotted out, summarized in one or two lines, and then dismissed. I wanted more depth, more case studies, and a higher-level vantage point.

Despite a short tour of command lines, including natural language text commands, and a 10 page summary of speech recognition and synthesis-based interfaces, "Designing the User Interface" is almost exclusively about contemporary computer graphical user interface design. Better books on GUI design include Johnson's "GUI Bloopers" and Raskin's "The Humane Interface".