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About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design 4th Edition
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The essential interaction design guide, fully revised and updated for the mobile age
About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, Fourth Edition is the latest update to the book that shaped and evolved the landscape of interaction design. This comprehensive guide takes the worldwide shift to smartphones and tablets into account. New information includes discussions on mobile apps, touch interfaces, screen size considerations, and more. The new full-color interior and unique layout better illustrate modern design concepts.
The interaction design profession is blooming with the success of design-intensive companies, priming customers to expect "design" as a critical ingredient of marketplace success. Consumers have little tolerance for websites, apps, and devices that don't live up to their expectations, and the responding shift in business philosophy has become widespread. About Face is the book that brought interaction design out of the research labs and into the everyday lexicon, and the updated Fourth Edition continues to lead the way with ideas and methods relevant to today's design practitioners and developers.
Updated information includes:
- Contemporary interface, interaction, and product design methods
- Design for mobile platforms and consumer electronics
- State-of-the-art interface recommendations and up-to-date examples
- Updated Goal-Directed Design methodology
Designers and developers looking to remain relevant through the current shift in consumer technology habits will find About Face to be a comprehensive, essential resource.
- ISBN-101118766571
- ISBN-13978-1118766576
- Edition4th
- PublisherWiley
- Publication dateSeptember 2, 2014
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions7.3 x 1.4 x 9.3 inches
- Print length720 pages
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Editorial Reviews
From the Inside Flap
MASTERING INTERACTION DESIGN FOR NEW DEVICES AND INTERFACES.
The first three editions of About Face shaped the evolution of interaction design, bringing it from development shops and research labs into the everyday language of product marketing, design and development. This fourth edition, the most significant revision yet, features a stunning new design and a full color interior. Addressing the many changes in the design landscape since its last publication, this new edition includes interaction methods and strategies for touchscreen phones and tablets, as well as updated chapters for the web and for desktop applications.
THIS NEW EDITION FEATURES
- Updated interaction design principles, patterns, and practices
- New content relevant to mobile platforms and differing screen sizes
- Updated examples reflecting current state-of-the-art interfaces
- The latest iteration of Cooper's popular Goal-Directed Design methodology
From the Back Cover
MASTERING INTERACTION DESIGN FOR NEW DEVICES AND INTERFACES.
The first three editions of About Face shaped the evolution of interaction design, bringing it from development shops and research labs into the everyday language of product marketing, design and development. This fourth edition, the most significant revision yet, features a stunning new design and a full color interior. Addressing the many changes in the design landscape since its last publication, this new edition includes interaction methods and strategies for touchscreen phones and tablets, as well as updated chapters for the web and for desktop applications.
THIS NEW EDITION FEATURES
- Updated interaction design principles, patterns, and practices
- New content relevant to mobile platforms and differing screen sizes
- Updated examples reflecting current state-of-the-art interfaces
- The latest iteration of Cooper's popular Goal-Directed Design methodology
About the Author
ALAN COOPER is a founder of Cooper and a pioneer of modern computing. His groundbreaking work has influenced a generation of programmers, business people, and users.
ROBERT REIMANN was founding president of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). He is Principal Interaction Designer at PatientsLikeMe, and former Director of Design R&D at Cooper.
DAVID CRONIN is a Design Director at GE. He was also Director of Interaction Design at Smart Design, and a former Managing Director at Cooper.
CHRISTOPHER NOESSEL is Cooper's first Design Fellow, and the co-author of Make It So. He teaches and speaks about design all over the world.
Product details
- Publisher : Wiley; 4th edition (September 2, 2014)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 720 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1118766571
- ISBN-13 : 978-1118766576
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 7.3 x 1.4 x 9.3 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #79,637 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #12 in User Experience & Website Usability
- #23 in Human-Computer Interaction (Books)
- #151 in Computer Science (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

Robert Reimann has spent the last 25+ years pushing the boundaries of digital products as a designer, writer, and consultant. He has led dozens of web, desktop, and device-based interaction design projects, for startups and Fortune 500 companies alike. Robert has lectured on interaction design and UX methods and principles at major universities and corporations, and to international industry audiences.
Robert was a founding director and first President of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). He has also held advisory board positions for AIGA Experience Design, the Information Architecture Institute, and UC Berkeley's Institute of Design (BiD) and was a board member of Design Museum Boston from 2010-2012. With Alan Cooper, Robert is co-author of two bestselling editions of About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design.
Robert's past positions include Principal Interaction Designer at PatientsLikeMe and Sonos, Associate Creative Director at frog design, Manager of User Experience at Bose, and Director of Design R&D at Cooper, where he played a key role building their design practice, and in the development and refinement of their goal-directed design methods, including personas and scenario-based design. Robert is currently a Director of Experience Design at athenahealth.

For over 30 years, Alan Cooper has been a pioneer of the modern computing era. His groundbreaking work in software design and construction has influenced a generation of programmers and business people alike and helped a generation of users embrace interaction design. He is best known as the "Father of Visual Basic" and is the founder of Cooper, a leading interaction design consultancy.

Christopher Noessel is a veteran in the UX world: designing products, services, and strategy for the health, financial, and consumer domains, among many others.
Christopher has been doing interaction design for more than 20 years (longer than we've even been calling it that). He co-founded a small interaction design agency where he developed interactive exhibitions and environments for museums, and he worked as a director of information design at international Web consultancy marchFIRST, where he also helped establish the interaction design Center of Excellence. He was instrumental in crafting the pair design practice while at Cooper, while working with clients from worldwide media companies to local startups.
Christopher was one of the founding graduates of the now-passing-into legend Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Ivrea, Italy, where his thesis project was a comprehensive service design for lifelong learners called Fresh. The project was presented at the MLearn conference in London in 2003. He has since helped to visualize the future of counterterrorism as a freelancer, built prototypes of coming technologies for Microsoft, and designed telehealth devices to accommodate the crazy facts of modern health care in his role at Cooper.
Christopher has written for online publications for many years, and was first published in print as co-author of the interaction design pattern chapter in the textbook edited by Simson Garfinkel, RFID: Applications, Security, and Privacy. His Spidey-sense goes off at random topics, and this has led him to speak at conferences around the world about a wide range of things, including interactive narrative, ethnographic user research, interaction design, sex-related interactive technologies, free-range learning, the Interface Parenthesis and the future of interaction design, and the relationship between science fiction and interface design.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book's content great and essential for anyone in the IT world. They say it's the best book on interactive design and user-centered product design. However, opinions differ on the durability of the physical book. Some find the content solid but the binding weak or falling apart, while others report issues with pages falling out or cracking after opening the book.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book's content great. They say it's essential reading for anyone in the IT world, highly recommended for students, and a must-have guide for UX professionals. The book provides principles that work no matter what technology you're using. It also provides philosophies, methods, and resources experienced UX professionals use.
"...What's more, the book provides philosophies, methods, and resources that experienced design managers can use to build happy design teams that..." Read more
"The content is as good as the Bible. But the publishers should be ashamed of themselves for not reading it and practicing what Cooper says...." Read more
"I don't want to ding this book on the content, the previous editions were great, but like another reviewer, the book literally cracked in half and..." Read more
"...Overall the content is spot on as a comprehensive look at the subject and is highly usable as a step by step guide for user engagement." Read more
Customers find the book helpful for interactive design and user engagement. They say it provides good frameworks for user engagement and understanding the strategic position of experience designers in the development process. The book is described as detailed, a must-read for UX designers and product managers.
"...more, the book provides philosophies, methods, and resources that experienced design managers can use to build happy design teams that programmers..." Read more
"...It provides good frameworks for user engagements and understanding the strategic position of experience designers in the development process...." Read more
"Very useful book on the overview of the process overall and in great details. Would highly recommend" Read more
"...It also does a decent job at describing the history and conventions of UI that existed in the past, but has nothing to say about where UI is going,..." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the book's durability. Some find the content solid and the concepts useful, but the binding is weak and pages fall out easily. Others mention the physical book falls apart and the binding cracks on first opening.
"I love the material in the book but the pages are falling out. I'm holding the book together with binder clips...." Read more
"...editions were great, but like another reviewer, the book literally cracked in half and pages started falling out the first time I (gently) opened it...." Read more
"It has some solid concepts, most of which can be found in blog posts...." Read more
"...Only a few months old, have only read about half of it and it's literally falling apart. Shameful." Read more
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Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on November 24, 2014Want to know how to make great software products and systems? Buy this book, read it, and share with your team. There's really nothing like it.
This is the fourth version of a 1995 book by Alan Cooper that helped launch the interaction design discipline. Written for practitioners and cited by researchers, each edition of About Face has advanced the field. And this thoroughly updated edition will do the same.
Sure, you can read blogs on the web that have interesting tidbits to say about designing for social, the niceties of interactive data displays, or gesture design for mobile. And you can certainly buy books that offer design lessons and principles. But no other resource has tackled the subject at the methodical depth and breadth that Cooper's team of writers do here.
The material is useful for newbie designers (worth the price just for the consistent and battle-tested vocabulary). What's more, the book provides philosophies, methods, and resources that experienced design managers can use to build happy design teams that programmers and executives love to work with.
The writing is often playful, the design is elegant, and the ideas are incendiary. Enjoy!
- Reviewed in the United States on August 20, 2016The content is as good as the Bible. But the publishers should be ashamed of themselves for not reading it and practicing what Cooper says. If you can't make something delightful to use, at least don't make it infuriating. Ironically, the best book on interaction design has the worst possible kindle interface. Why did they not put in so simple a thing as a table of contents! It's not the kind of book one reads in a straight line, but you skip around and use it like a reference. Yet there is no table of contents--just three sections you can link to and a text list of the chapters within. No running heads so you know where you are. No page numbers. Ironic and infuriating and I'd return it if not for the comments that the paper version uses cheap paperback glue.
- Reviewed in the United States on November 22, 2014I don't want to ding this book on the content, the previous editions were great, but like another reviewer, the book literally cracked in half and pages started falling out the first time I (gently) opened it. Here is hoping that the publisher addresses the issue, or perhaps this is part of a bad run -- but it is pretty amazing that Wiley let these out the door.
I don't want to ding this book on the content, the previous editions were great, but like another reviewer, the book literally cracked in half and pages started falling out the first time I (gently) opened it. Here is hoping that the publisher addresses the issue, or perhaps this is part of a bad run -- but it is pretty amazing that Wiley let these out the door.
Images in this review
- Reviewed in the United States on March 17, 2017The book is informative for product and interaction design. It provides good frameworks for user engagements and understanding the strategic position of experience designers in the development process. It goes into great detail about the user mental models and how that should inform the design of systems. Overall the content is spot on as a comprehensive look at the subject and is highly usable as a step by step guide for user engagement.
- Reviewed in the United States on October 15, 2021Very useful book on the overview of the process overall and in great details. Would highly recommend
- Reviewed in the United States on March 29, 2021The book is great. The book seller is horrible! I returned the book four times!!!! Because each time I received it damaged!
- Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2017This book is fantastic for beginners, but is not very useful for anyone who already has even a modest background in UX. I was a M.A. in Human-Computer Interaction, so I already had a footing in research methods and UI design by the time I came around to this book. I bought this book about 8 months into my first job when we were about to start working on a desktop application, and the literature on desktop UI is already very lacking on the internet. In this respect, About Face is somewhat useful in providing some limited perspective on desktop UI conventions. It also does a decent job at describing the history and conventions of UI that existed in the past, but has nothing to say about where UI is going, and how to adjust to a changing UI landscape.
This book has mostly been used by me to provide context when I'm setting off on defining a new feature or function for a piece of software, and it helps me perform 'sanity checks' when my non-UX colleagues try to assert that a certain UI element is used in a certain way and I need to demonstrate why they're wrong (e.g., "No, Brad, About Face particularly cautions against the use of cascading menus.").
- Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2015I love the material in the book but the pages are falling out. I'm holding the book together with binder clips. I've only read up through chapter 4 and there are 21 chapters. They don't make binder clips big enough! Am I going to need to glue it?
5/5 for content
0/5 for binding
Top reviews from other countries
Cliente AmazonReviewed in Italy on March 28, 20245.0 out of 5 stars Il prodotto funziona
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Ederson Ferreira novackiReviewed in Brazil on May 10, 20215.0 out of 5 stars Livro essencial na area
O livro se mostra essencial pra quem quer trabalhar na area. A quantidade de conhecimento estampada nessas paginas faz com que ele seja nao um extra, mas uma parte essencial da carreira de qualquer designer da area
Tara Shankar DasReviewed in India on February 18, 20225.0 out of 5 stars Must Read!
A must read for interaction designer!
Franzia FloresReviewed in Mexico on January 9, 20205.0 out of 5 stars If you are into interaction design, experience design, user interface design it is A MUST
It is a big book, so I suggest you take your time and underline whatever you find useful. But it is a great book to get the feel into interaction design. Every chapter teaches you something valuable and applicable on any project you might have.
SophieReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 1, 20205.0 out of 5 stars Great book, perfect intro to user experience design and research
Great book, I bought this for my masters in Human-Centered Interactive Technologies and it was really useful for some of the modules i did. The book is great value for money and the illustrations are useful, especially for a visual learner.







