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Title: Designing the User Interface by Ben Shneiderman ISBN: 0-201-69497-2 Publisher: Pearson Addison Wesley Pub. Date: 15 July, 1997 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $83.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.11 (9 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: It's not really a book, but a collection of disparate words.
Comment: 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: 5
Summary: Foundation book for HCI
Comment: 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: 2
Summary: A Verbose Syllabus
Comment: 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".
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