Customer Reviews

The Elements of Friendly Software Design

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I find this book to be one of the best I've read & applied to my craft.

Worth reading and re-reading, it collects pearls of wisdom from many sources, and relates what we do with what has been done before in other, related communications forms.

This is one of the few timeless technical books. I got this book many years ago, I still kept it on my shelf and flip through it occasionally. Unlike most other high-tech books, this book was written in a fun way with a much broader view. It relates the software development process to the process of creating other communication craft: a movie, a fine art, or a good writing. Revise is the nature of this process. I once used the point I learned from this book successfully convinced my boss(es) at that time to do user interface rapid prototyping.

This book kind of reads like a precursor to About Face. The book has a lot of the same ideas like knowing the user, metaphors, and mental models. It was an easy read, including the author's thinly-related essay on getting his patents recognized by large corporations that were infringing. I would say the author's main focus about design was that it is all about communication. I agree 100%. In my own studies and writing I have come to the same conclusion and the book just felt like more validation. Effective communication is what makes things work. Whether it is advertising, movies, books, user interfaces, or written code, communicating clearly allows everything else to happen naturally and with less friction. The book does not offer direct examples of how to use radio buttons or when to use a drop down list versus a list box, etc. That's not the point. Rather it really is just essay after essay covering 25+ elements of design. Regardless of whether you are developing a user interface, coding a method, or designing the handle of a car door, the elements should be understood.