Rating: 
Summary: The story of my life made simple
Review: As an IT project manager for a Fortune 500 company supporting online programs and projects, as well as web sites and applications, this book summarizes a day in my life. Not just a must-read, but a godsend for both application developers and UI designers -- two groups who traditionally don't always see eye-to-eye. Can't we all just get along? Yes! This book tells you how, using simple, easy-to-understand language and real-life examples. End users and customers will thank you for reading it.
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Summary: The Art of Example
Review: Ever wonder why, if books are almost always read by just one reader at a time, when reading a technical book you feel as if you're in a lecture hall with a distant expert addressing hundreds of students? There's an extra intimacy that's created when an expert is confident enough to address the student as a peer. Ellen Isaacs and Alan Walendowski draw the reader in as an active participant using a superb extended example and a friendly conversational style. It's like the Socratic method but with Socrates as a peer. Two Socrates! Using an example of an instant messenger that extends over two-thirds of the book, Ellen and Alan not only share their knowledge about usability but also about a real-world software development process. Rather than dictate this, they share their own thoughts as they repeatedly rework their product based on their own concerns and user feedback. It feels as if you joined their small development team and were privy to each obstacle they encountered in a highly iterative path.
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Summary: Excellent UI design book. Programmers should also read it.
Review: First let me tell you this is an interaction design (or user interface design) book, since the title of the book doesn't do this job well. This is one of the books that have great impact on me. I agree with the review written by Kevin Mullet (printed on the book's back cover) that the ideas presented in this book are a bit "dangerous". It is dangerous because they are not the common practice yet. If people want to follow these ideas, they need to have changes. Changes are always dangerous to many people. Those "dangerous" ideas include: - Build fewer features but build them well. (The current practice is to build as many features as possible so that marketers can list those features for promotion. Is a product easy to use? Everyone can claim that since there are no criteria for such a claim.) - User interface design should drive the system architecture, not the other way around. (Modifying system architecture is always hard. If we want to support a certain interaction afterwards, the architecture will probably can't support cleanly, if at all.) - Technology should be used for user needs, but not for technology's own sake. (Visual design should also be treated the same.)
Last but not least, this book shows that user interface design is actually science but not art. We don't need a graphic design degree to be an interaction designer.
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Summary: Your will is my command. --Jeeves
Review: I have been a software engineer for over a decade. In all that time, one of my least favorite engineering activities has been GUI design and programming. Part of the problem for me has always been the disconnect between what the UI designer or customer envisions and what the programmer can realistically deliver. This book can help tremendously in bridging that gap. It is written by a UI Designer and a Software Engineer, and takes into account both of their viewpoints. After an initial introductory section to the basic concepts of good UI design, which is very thorough, as any butler should be (read the book to understand), the authors then relate a real-world example in which they collaborated on the design and implementation of a real product. Along the way, they provide some excellent ideas and techniques for how to go about producing a user-friendly user interface that won't take 5 major releases to get right. The product, an Instant Messaging application called Hubbub, is real and can be downloaded for free and installed on any Windows machine or Palm OS handheld. Although not as mature as other IM's out there, it is eminently usable and has some nifty UI features that the current crop don't offer. But it's not necessary to be a Hubbub user to read the book. It's just a nice side benefit for those who would like to give it a whirl. In keeping with their overall ideas about good UI design, the book is very well organized, easy to read, and has several nice "GUI" features itself. You can tell that the authors themselves probably had a hand in how the book was put together. It is not overly long (about 300 pages), so it doesn't take several weeks to read. Nor is it written in a typical "computer textbook" style. There are plenty of pictures and figures that really help to demonstrate the various points the authors make. It also makes excellent use of color. But perhaps the best "feature" of this book is that it is peppered with "Design Guidelines", each of which sums up in a sentence or two an important aspect of good UI design. And, just to make it even easier, there is an appendix that brings all the design guidelines together in one location for easy reference later on. Overall, this is an excellent treatment of a subject that probably causes more headaches for designers and engineers than any other in the world of software development. I highly recommend this book for any UI Designer, Software Engineer or Manager who wants to gain a better perspective on the issues involved in designing a user-friendly UI, and, even better, how to go about doing it right. I would not want to embark upon a UI-intensive project unless all parties involved had read this book beforehand.
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Summary: A book that wont simply collect dust on your bookshelf!
Review: I highly recommend this book as an invaluable resource for anyone currently in, or looking to enter, the instructional design field. The authors have successfully been able to present information, which can often be dry and complex, in a clear and easy to read format. I have a read many books in this area and they have been a fantastic cure for insomnia. This on the other hand is a compelling read from start to finish. Many of the concepts presented will not be foreign to people that work in this field or in the area of product development. However the logical order and detailed examples work brilliantly to drive home the principles. Publishers in this area should use this book as a bench mark for design and layout for its susinct and logical passage. Thank you very much Ellen and Allan for such a useful tool!
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Summary: Changing Standard Practice?
Review: I'm not an expert in either Interface Design or Programming Methodology, and I've only read a little bit in these areas. As I read this book, I found myself thinking: "You mean this approach isn't standard practice already?" After reading Ellen and Alan's description of how a UI Designer and a Developer should interact with each other, it just seems so obvious that everyone should work this way. User needs should affect architecture, and technology constrains design--how hard can it be to understand that? But the implications--design and development are iterative, and ongoing user testing is critical to the iterative process--could change the way some people think about programming projects. (The old Specify, Design, Program, Test, Release process seems somewhat naive in retrospect.) The book has a kind of fun and lively feel to it. It's clear that the authors were having fun telling their various stories, and were excited about illustrating their points. The writing is casual, which made it amazingly easy to read. On the other hand, once the informal style sold me on the overall approach, I almost immediately wanted a more rigorous treatment. I'd have loved an Appendix that summarized the formats of the various documents, for instance, and perhaps one that reviews the process flow diagram used at the beginning of the later chapters. (As a former academic, I found myself wondering as well about the independence and completeness of the Design Guidelines, too, but that's my quirk. It's probably not an issue most readers would care about.) I think this book could become one of those that inspires a sort of religious commitment to its vision, and that that would probably be a very good thing.
Rating:
Summary: Changing Standard Practice?
Review: I'm not an expert in either Interface Design or Programming Methodology, and I've only read a little bit in these areas. As I read this book, I found myself thinking: "You mean this approach isn't standard practice already?" After reading Ellen and Alan's description of how a UI Designer and a Developer should interact with each other, it just seems so obvious that everyone should work this way. User needs should affect architecture, and technology constrains design--how hard can it be to understand that? But the implications--design and development are iterative, and ongoing user testing is critical to the iterative process--could change the way some people think about programming projects. (The old Specify, Design, Program, Test, Release process seems somewhat naive in retrospect.) The book has a kind of fun and lively feel to it. It's clear that the authors were having fun telling their various stories, and were excited about illustrating their points. The writing is casual, which made it amazingly easy to read. On the other hand, once the informal style sold me on the overall approach, I almost immediately wanted a more rigorous treatment. I'd have loved an Appendix that summarized the formats of the various documents, for instance, and perhaps one that reviews the process flow diagram used at the beginning of the later chapters. (As a former academic, I found myself wondering as well about the independence and completeness of the Design Guidelines, too, but that's my quirk. It's probably not an issue most readers would care about.) I think this book could become one of those that inspires a sort of religious commitment to its vision, and that that would probably be a very good thing.
Rating:
Summary: High Quality Information for Both Kinds Of Practitioners
Review: There are several things to love about this book: I'm not a human interface expert but I felt that I learned good lessons about HI design from reading the book. I loved the way that the software development and HI design were both presented in the book, and since each was presented by solid practitioners, I had an easy time reading the content for each. Each side felt authoritative and crisp; the engineering explanations made sense and were easy read, and the HI side seemed to make a lot of sense.
The book is funny, too. Not *all* the time, but I laughed when I read it. The authors keep the book from getting too heavy-handed or preachy, and just seem to have fun with the material.
There are excellent examples all over the book, too. I personaly hate hearing arguments with no data; this book has data to back up almost every claim or point made, in my opinion.
I definitely recommend the book.
Rating:
Summary: High Quality Information for Both Kinds Of Practitioners
Review: There are several things to love about this book: I'm not a human interface expert but I felt that I learned good lessons about HI design from reading the book. I loved the way that the software development and HI design were both presented in the book, and since each was presented by solid practitioners, I had an easy time reading the content for each. Each side felt authoritative and crisp; the engineering explanations made sense and were easy read, and the HI side seemed to make a lot of sense.
The book is funny, too. Not *all* the time, but I laughed when I read it. The authors keep the book from getting too heavy-handed or preachy, and just seem to have fun with the material.
There are excellent examples all over the book, too. I personaly hate hearing arguments with no data; this book has data to back up almost every claim or point made, in my opinion.
I definitely recommend the book.
Rating: 
Summary: All web and product designers should read this
Review: This book has many examples of good and bad web pages and also consumer products. What it covers is seemingly obvious, but apparently not realized by many. It shows how users and designers can work together for optimal result. It should be a required reading for anyone doing user-interface designs. It is good that they actually have a good free product, HUBBUB ... .that was created using this design philosophy.
I didn't give it a 5-star only because, to me, the section of their HUBBUB experience and the conclusion was too long and could have been made more concise. Also, it was disappointing to see their product not following their own design goals well enough, which seemed to make the book less effective.
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