Effective UI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software [Paperback]

EffectiveUI (Author), Jonathan Anderson (Author), John McRee (Author), Robb Wilson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 10, 2010

People expect effortless, engaging interaction with desktop and web applications, but producing software that generates enjoyable user experiences is much harder than many companies anticipate. With Effective UI, you'll learn proven user-experience strategies that will satisfy your clients and customers, drive business value, and increase brand strength.

This book shows you how to capture the collaborative and cooperative spirit among designers, engineers, and management required for building engaging software. You'll also learn valuable methods for maintaining focus throughout the process -- whether you're a product manager who needs a clear roadmap, a developer or designer looking for guidance and advocacy, or a businessperson who wants to understand and manage user-experience software initiatives.

Learn how to build software that will:

• Generate engaging and interactive experiences between consumers and businesses, or between businesspeople and their information systems
• Account for how people work with, think about, and consume information
• Establish a richer means of collaboration and communication
• Reduce frustration by streamlining complex tasks and creating processes that are more intuitive
• Distinguish products, services, and brands to create a competitive advantage
• Create scalable systems that adapt to changing user needs and behaviors

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jonathan Anderson helped found EffectiveUI before becoming managing editor of UX Magazine, an online resource for user experience professionals and enthusiasts. In this role, Jonathan develops and oversees original content creation and sourcing that explores the maturing field of UX and details industry trends and emerging technologies.
John McRee is a lead information architect for EffectiveUI who brings more than a decade of experience to designing highly intuitive and engaging user interfaces. Specializing in design process management, user research, information architecture and interaction design, John has designed software for a diverse group of clients, including many Fortune 500 companies.
Robb Wilson is co-owner of UX Magazine and a technology research consultant for many Fortune 500 companies, including Qwest and National Geographic. An active member in the UX community, Robb's work affords him the unique opportunity to meld business strategy with creative processes and emerging technologies. He has worked as a creative executive at Time Warner and is an industry thought leader, providing innovative insight on emerging technologies and trends. Robb has founded four successful technology companies.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (February 10, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 059615478X
• ISBN-13: 978-0596154783
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 0.6 x 10 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #305,893 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #16 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Software Engineering > Multimedia Information Systems
  • #67 in Books > Computers & Technology > Home Computing & How-to > Web Browsers

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 37 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Want to deliver more effective UIs? Don't waste your money... February 24, 2010

By Andrzej J. Taramina

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

If you are looking for a good book on UI design principles, methods, tips and tricks, with concrete examples and suggestions, then don't bother spending your money on this tome. It should have been titled "Effective PM (for beginners)", as it's almost exclusively about project management rather than UI design.

If you are familiar with iterative development practices, agile, the perils of waterfall, requirements analysis, stakeholder relations, team building and the overall software project management process, then you will find nothing new in this book. The first few chapters read like a marketing brochure for the Effective UI consulting group. If you know little of these areas, or have a manager/stakeholder that you want to try to convert, then this book might provide some value as a high level introduction to software project management.

To me, this was very disappointing. I have dozens and dozens of O'Reilly books, decades of SW dev experience from C-level on down, and this is the first O'Reilly book that I've purchased that I would send back (if that just wasn't worth the time/trouble to do so). I'll probably just give it to the Goodwill charity, and hope that someone can benefit from it.

With it's current title, I rate this barely as a 1, and then only because they included some interesting, albeit barely relevant, quotes from Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. If they had changed the title to "Effective PM - An Introduction to Software Development management/practices" then it might rate a 3.

O'Reilly dropped the ball on this one, IMO.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Title should have been 'Effective Software Project Management' March 27, 2011

By Duane Moore

Format:Paperback

The authors of this book share many great insights into software project management, many of which I can confirm from my own experience. So why is the book called Effective UI? It does very little to describe tangible steps that need to be taken to introduce more effective design and development practices that will lead to better user experiences. Many insights the authors share such as "the raw materials that go into building a software product are the intelligence, ingenuity, and creativity of the team that builds it" risk sounding trite. Of course it is hard to fault the authors for sharing such insights because they may not be obvious to everyone. But I think it's fair to say that people thinking of buying this book will expect something quite different, as I did. In Chapter 7, for example, they describe how to map high-level workflows to help define requirements, making platform and framework choices, mapping interactions with external systems, defining business logic, how to use revision control and automated testing. Perhaps the authors felt it was necessary to cover these topics, even cursorily, but the topics really belong in a book called "Software Engineering" or "Software Project Management", not a book called "Effective UI". If someone you know has a copy of this book to borrow, you probably will not regret reading it, but I can't recommend buying the book as you will probably be getting something quite different than what you expect.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Read the description! March 9, 2010

By Anthony Franco

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

The book is meant to be a review for project managers and executives who want to manage projects towards higher user adoption. The negative reviewers obviously have not taken the time to read the description and the purpose of the book.

Funny, because I hear many designers and developers complain about how frustrated they are with mangers that don't understand how to manage software products towards user experience. Perhaps the negative reviewers would find value from the book if they handed it to their boss so everyone is on the same page.

The most valuable review comes from Ira Laefsky, who is an independent expert in the field..