Customer Reviews

The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design

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2 star:		(1)
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Don't get me wrong, this book has a lot to offer: 500+ pages of it! But it was written in 1990 and it shows.

Almost everyone who has written a paper for this collection has some link to Macintosh (except for Timothy Leary of course). All examples are Macintosh based. And we're not talking G3's here. We're talking Mac II's.

No mention is made of the Web (how could it be?). It does, however, make a lot of good points that are applicable for all User Interface designs.

So, in general, this is a good book for it's time, but it's time has well and truly passed.

It's time for this book to be re-collected and updated, I think. Parts of it (particularly the essays grouped under 'Creativity and Design' and 'Users and Contexts') are very useful for today's interface design world. However there are sections (particularly the section on 'New Directions') where it feels *very* dated and really suffers from being written before Internet time.

An extremely impressive group of writers participates. Including: Howard Rheingold, Don Norman, Bruce Tognazzini, Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Kay, Timothy Leary and Gitta Salomon. It's definitely worth a read, but don't be afraid (unless you're a Macintosh history buff) to skip large sections.

This tome is older - there's no getting around that. However, we don't throw out calculus because it is old. This book contains the principals of interface design, and they still apply. (I didn't like the binding, my copy having fallen apart after about 5 or 6 years of use). It is always a refreshing and lively read - even after the eleventeenth read!

Folks new to modern user interface design principles will get the most out of this book. It gives a good insight into the types of thinking that go into excellent user interface designs.

More experienced folks may find this book falling behind the state of the art, but interesting from a historical perspective.

Almost every aspect of human-computer interface design is covered in this book. Here you'll not find step-by-step procedures, but instead a wide range of opinions, experiences and conclusions on what really works (and what doesn't) on interfaces. The new media researcher, as well as the professional, will find this book useful and inspiring. And don't be scared by this book's size! It is as interactive as its subject, so you can read it non-sequentially in small chapters.

"Good task analysis means continual user testing, starting as soon as the work begins." pp9.
This book contain good design concept on human-computer interface.
Some of them are implemented to Macintosh.
The web including html is good technology, but some design are not good for user.
Please back to this book, you may get the good design concept about the web.

I guess it depends on what you are looking for, you may find this book useful or not. For me, it was waste of time. I went a half way through now and I am not getting much new that I did not know before.
This is a collection of papers, so it feels scattered. Each author gives a very narrow and specific view to the part of UI design that they worked on and of course they are out-dated. This is not what I was looking for in a book titled "The art of human-computer interface design".

As someone said, they should recall this book and revise to get it up to date.

Of course this book dosen't metion the web. It was written back when the WWW was not even a twinkle in Netscape's eye. Forget the black and white preaching of Jakob Nielson this is the true holy book of digital interface designers. I've been in interviews where they ask about this book.

This book really wasn't what I thought. It's hard to read as it is outdated (like Mac II days), hardly any examples, a lot of text and not many picture examples. I'm also not sure where the "art" part is as most examples and explanations aren't very creative and lacks getting to the point which is what good visual interface design is all about. I became sketchy reading the book for advice because of this. One of the pictures in the book even had a large monkey playing on a computer keyboard. I simply thru the book in the trash because it was big and didn't want to carry it around. The only thing this book did teach me was what "not" to do when writing a book.