Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper, Robert M. Reimann ISBN: 0-7645-2641-3 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 17 March, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.11 (27 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Great author. Awful book.
Comment: I loved "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum", and bought "About Face" looking for some concrete examples of how to implement its ideas. Unfortunately, all of Cooper's concrete ideas are just awful. Half of them would require strong AI in order to implement, and many of them would actually require the computer to have psychic powers.
For instance, he spends a lot of time explaining that programs need to be written to assume that users will make mistakes (because they will), rather than considering mistakes to be a break in the workflow. Sure, sounds good. But then later on, he suggests that if the user of an accounting system enters a record with an invalid account number, the computer should just assume that it's actually a valid account number that the user just hasn't told it about yet. And worse, he suggests that the system should accept it *silently*, and not tell the user that anything at all odd happened until it gets around to generating the end-of-month report and there's still no matching account number. Can you imagine the user of such a system, when the computer finally tells him that *a month ago*, he made a typo while entering a record, and now he has to go digging through paper records (assuming he still even has them) to find the correct information?
It's the same thing with many of his other examples. He suggests ways for the computer to be "smart" that are clearly smart in the very specific cases he's thinking of, but often dumber than before in every other case.
Rating: 4
Summary: There's more to give for the user than rtfm
Comment: I've read the book once, and I'll read it again. So will my colleagues. The authors had done a very good job gathering together the high-level problems concerning user interface (or user interaction) desing. They don't provide out-of-box solutions to every existing usability problem, but designing an interface is not like boolean logic.
The book introduces some new terms, to me that's fine. For example, "user profile" or "user role" is not the same as "persona", as the authors state in p. 61. It's a design tool for their design process, and the meaning behind the terms should not be considered the same.
We're propably going to apply this book's methods in our organization. But we're also going to use usability professionals. After all, we all have a developer background too.
Some developers might think that the book has an offensive attitude against them, as seen in other reviews. Hopefully in version 3.0 the authors find words that would be easier to swallow also for the people who actually do the coding. Then I'd rate it five stars.
Rating: 3
Summary: Good techniques on design, but sometimes a bit preachy
Comment: Personas and goal-directed design are great techniques for putting together a quality product and really making sure that you're building the right things for your users. In particular, this book provides a process for doing design that would help most teams do a better job of being more customer-focused.
Unfortunately, this book has a few bones to pick with the current ways that users work. In many cases, while I may agree with statements such as that the File menu is not strictly necessary, users of many programs already understand how things work under the hood and want to know about it directly. He sometimes preaches design as if all customers of software are and should be ignorant of the system they're working on. I write software for other developers, so a lot of the tips and advice he gives are actually things that would cause my customer to become quite angry -- they understand the system, want to work in terms of it, and want to be able to to understand how your program deals with it. There are a number of commercial software tool failures to prove the mistakes of those who've tried to force a model the designers thought was superior on developers who knew better (ever used Visual Age Java?).
There's also a lot of material duplicated from his earlier book, _The Inmates Are Running the Asylum_. If you're only going to read one of the two, I'd advise reading that one, and skipping this one.
 |
Title: The Inmates Are Running the Asylum : Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How To Restore The Sanity by Alan Cooper ISBN: 0672316498 Publisher: SAMS Pub. Date: 06 April, 1999 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
 |
Title: Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces by Carolyn Snyder ISBN: 1558608702 Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Pub. Date: 02 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
 |
Title: The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman ISBN: 0465067107 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 17 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
 |
Title: The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web by Jesse James Garrett ISBN: 0735712026 Publisher: New Riders Pub. Date: 11 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $29.99 |
 |
Title: Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug ISBN: 0789723107 Publisher: New Riders Pub. Date: 13 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
