Customer Reviews

About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

This book is a self-indulgent rant, that is also poorly edited and structured. If the authors had read their own book and applied their principles to its pages, reading it would have been as much of a pleasure as using software that follows their advice.

Why do I give it 5 stars?
Because beneath the diatribes and soapbox oration there is a depth of experience and of thought I have not found elsewhere.

The authors have considered the issue of what makes using software a pleasurable experience for the user in a depth and with a degree of insight that opened my eyes.

Two thirds of this book are roughly the same as the previous version, but if you want to find some new gems of information you should read it all. Reading it all was no exercise for me. It reminded me of some issues I had forgetten and am not using and I was pleased to be reminded.

The first part on the Cooper Process is excellent and gives lots of insights and new information. The new chapter on Visual Design is a bit simplistic in my view, but if you know the matter you shouldn't be bothered by that.

All examples are updated and fresh. Some new pictures of Cooper project help in making the case. I particularly liked the interactive pie charts for example.

As the Web is moving towards Rich Internet application and the desktop applicatios are moving towards Rich Internet information applications this is the best and most up to date resource for Interaction Design we have at this moment.

I read it in a weekend. I bet you will too...

This follow up to About Face is a good overview of the critical concepts to improve software usability. Cooper and Reiman know their stuff. Reading this certainly provides you with the grounding you need to make good decisions. At a tactical level, the book could certainly do more to help with real-world examples.
For that, you may want to take a look instead at Jenifer Tidwell's Designing Interfaces : Patterns for Effective Interaction Design. Where About Face is strong on theory, Designing Interfaces is all about practical ideas, demonstrated through graphical examples.
If UI is an important part of your world, buy them both.

A great book , with alot of great content. Unfortunately , as has been noted before, the author's tone is often arrogant and demeaning. Throughout the book he stresses never make the user feel stupid , then on the next line he's calling you the reader / developer stupid because you did this or that. But don't let that ruin the book. Just like with most things in life , you have to weed out the BS and negativity to get to the good stuff. It really is a shame they didn't apply their own techniques to the book though.

Out of reading this book, I was inspired to make many changes to my software interface that resulted in dramatic improvements to quality and usability. There are times when I wish it had more out-of-the-box solutions and concrete examples of how to design, and there are times when it devolves to ranting. But there is real help here for me as a software designer.

Background. I am an applications developer with 10 years experience. I usually write applications that are very "User centric" and I am always looking for ways to improve my design skills

I found this book to be very strong in some areas and very weak in others.

For example, in the first section where it is talking about the analysis, the ideas it suggests is very good but hard to grasp in practical terms. A case study example to tie all the stages together would have been invaluable.

Later on when the authors are talking about the "exise" they make a strong case of why it should be avoided but fail to mention the single biggest exise mistake of any application whch is the "mouse to keboard to mouse" transition.

In the later parts of the book when it gets down individual controls it really just describes them without giving any real concrete advise on how they should be used. I got as many good ideas from a single Joel on software blog than this whole section

I found myself disagreeing with several sections of the book, most notably the section on files and databases.

On the other hand the sections on "Posture" and "goals" has certainly made me think about applications differently.

On balance I think that it was valuable for me to read this book but I was dissappointed that there was so little in the way of "tips and tricks" and not enough examples in the earlier sections to really illustrate the points made

When Alan Cooper wrote the first edition of About Face in 1997, the software industry was in the midst of its biggest change ever. Just about every new user interface was being created in the context of a Web browser. Cooper was the leading advocate to persuade software developers, graphic artists, usability designers, and interaction designers to avoid bringing the mistakes that got baked into desktop application software developing into Web development. His impact has been profound, but not very easy for most software developers.

Key to this book is to understand that it challenges software developers to consider a user's goals first. And the book means "a user", not all of the users, but a single user. I've been to Alan's presentations and you can see the software developers in the audience squirm in their seats. "Don't I have to build my software to work for the largest group of users?" they ask. Alan's book says "No. Instead, build for a single user, and make sure your work accomplishes their one goal." About Face might be better titled "User Goal Oriented Software Development."

The book's focus on "interaction design," as opposed to user interface design, matches the key theme of user goal oriented development. For example, when my printer runs out of ink a dialog box appears on my computer asking for me to put more ink into the printer and then click one of the following buttons: Finish and Continue. As the user, my goal is to Finish, but the software wants me to put more ink in the printer and then to Continue. Interaction Design addresses this problem, where user interface design would more likely tell the software developer where to place the buttons in the dialog box. Interaction design keeps the focus on user goals.

I loved the original book, and find the new release to be refreshing.

-Frank Cohen, www.pushtotest.com

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.

I've been waiting for this book since I first heard about it from a friend last year. Now it's here and it's proving to be worth the wait. What I need to figure out now is, how can I make the designers of every software program I'll ever use read this book?

Hats off to Cooper and Reimann. You would think that their axioms are common sense, like "Never scroll text horizontally", or "If it's worth the user entering, it's worth the program remembering". But if those common sense ideas were actually common, why is there so much horrid software out there?

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.