Designing from Both Sides of the Screen: How Designers and Engineers Can Collaborate to Build Cooperative Technology [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

This is one of the books that have great impact on me. I agree with the review written by Kevin Mullet (printed on the book's back cover) that the ideas presented in this book are a bit "dangerous". It is dangerous because they are not the common practice yet. If people want to follow these ideas, they need to have changes. Changes are always dangerous to many people.

Those "dangerous" ideas include:

- Build fewer features but build them well. (The current practice is to build as many features as possible so that marketers can list those features for promotion. Is a product easy to use? Everyone can claim that since there are no criteria for such a claim.)

- User interface design should drive the system architecture, not the other way around. (Modifying system architecture is always hard. If we want to support a certain interaction afterwards, the architecture will probably can't support cleanly, if at all.)

- Technology should be used for user needs, but not for technology's own sake. (Visual design should also be treated the same.)

Last but not least, this book shows that user interface design is actually science but not art. We don't need a graphic design degree to be an interaction designer.

It is written by a UI Designer and a Software Engineer, and takes into account both of their viewpoints. After an initial introductory section to the basic concepts of good UI design, which is very thorough, as any butler should be (read the book to understand), the authors then relate a real-world example in which they collaborated on the design and implementation of a real product. Along the way, they provide some excellent ideas and techniques for how to go about producing a user-friendly user interface that won't take 5 major releases to get right. The product, an Instant Messaging application called Hubbub, is real and can be downloaded for free and installed on any Windows machine or Palm OS handheld. Although not as mature as other IM's out there, it is eminently usable and has some nifty UI features that the current crop don't offer. But it's not necessary to be a Hubbub user to read the book. It's just a nice side benefit for those who would like to give it a whirl.

In keeping with their overall ideas about good UI design, the book is very well organized, easy to read, and has several nice "GUI" features itself. You can tell that the authors themselves probably had a hand in how the book was put together. It is not overly long (about 300 pages), so it doesn't take several weeks to read. Nor is it written in a typical "computer textbook" style. There are plenty of pictures and figures that really help to demonstrate the various points the authors make. It also makes excellent use of color. But perhaps the best "feature" of this book is that it is peppered with "Design Guidelines", each of which sums up in a sentence or two an important aspect of good UI design. And, just to make it even easier, there is an appendix that brings all the design guidelines together in one location for easy reference later on.

Overall, this is an excellent treatment of a subject that probably causes more headaches for designers and engineers than any other in the world of software development. I highly recommend this book for any UI Designer, Software Engineer or Manager who wants to gain a better perspective on the issues involved in designing a user-friendly UI, and, even better, how to go about doing it right. I would not want to embark upon a UI-intensive project unless all parties involved had read this book beforehand.