The mother of all Interaction Design Books
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Maybe you have heard of Interaction design and is already practising in the fields of Graphic Design, Information Architecture or User Experience for digital products. If you are one of those who think that a better integration amongst those fields would work wonders in digital projects, look no further, this is your book.
Alan Cooper, Reimann and Cronin give you the best immersion of this area I have read in years. Although Usability is an area which is not really covered by Interaction Design the work is so thorough that you will know in which stages of digital projects you will be able to include the Usability workflow.
A masterpiece.
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If you really care about users, buy this book
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Deeply relevant and very influential: if you're a software developer, you owe it to your users to buy this book.
The book is organised into three distinct parts, each of which has a rather different tone. The first part is an introduction to "personas" and their goals. Much emphasis is placed on detailed research such as interviews with sample users, which is a fine luxury if you have the resources and time! However, even developers working in smaller teams will find the general principles useful.
The second part is concerned with the overall approach that an application should take. It discusses "posture": whether an application should be "full-screen" and sovereign or an infrequently used utility, and how this changes the top-level design.
This second part includes my favourite chapter, "Eliminating Excise", which is really pretty funny - it points out why we find prompts from Word annoying and why Motorola phones are just plain frustrating. However, the advice to fix these frustrations might be a bit over the top unless you have an infinite development budget: I too would love to have multi-level undos that are persistent across application sessions.
The final part covers specific advice on layouts and controls. It brings together more concrete suggestions based on the previous two parts.
It's quite possible that the ideas in this book influenced the design of applications such as Office 2007 and iTunes. Although few developers have the challenge of designing Web sites or applications for the mass market, the advice in this book is worth considering even for corporate applications. Just watch the budget!
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