Rating: 
Summary: Must read book for interface / interaction designers
Review: - Cooper & Reimann have clearly explained the steps involved in the 'user centered design' process in a logical and easy to understand manner.
- Process is the problem : The book begins by talkin about User's goals, history of interface design process and blames the 'traditional process' being the reason for rude & difficult to use products and expensive development costs.
- A good book to learn about user requirements research basics, user goals, user profiles & personas, scenarios, etc.,
- The book is a must read for business teams & interface designers. This book can be used as a text book in interaction design schools too.
- Think ,whenever author blames 'developers' for bad user experience, he is blaming the usage of 'Implementation Model'
Rating: 
Summary: Wait for the 3rd edition
Review: Although this book contains some very good observations, it is underpinned by an agenda which is the creation of a new craft called "Interaction Designer". Since any new craft needs its own jargon to confuse those who are "less learned", Cooper wastes no time creating one. His frequent use of less-familiar terms for the sake of exactness is distracting and weakens the effectiveness of his message. Here are a few examples:"Interaction design" instead of "user interface design"
"aphorism" and "axiom" instead of "principle"
"Subject Matter Experts" instead of "expert users"
"Ethnographic Interviews" instead of just "interviews"
"Personas" instead of "user profiles" The list goes on and on. Almost every other page introduces some new or uncommon term to be included in the jargon to be used by this new profession that Cooper wants to create. Personally, I think this book makes some really good points that deserve to be heard. Unfortunately, those "tender morsels" are buried in so much diatribe that most of the people who read the book are likely to miss them. I hope the authors get busy soon on a "About Face 3.0" edition that eliminates at least a third of the text and replaces the academic "high-brow" vernacular with common words and phrases that are already in common use. They also need to provide more examples of potential solutions to the problems that they point out. In the meantime, I can't honestly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Wait for the 3rd edition
Review: Although this book contains some very good observations, it is underpinned by an agenda which is the creation of a new craft called "Interaction Designer". Since any new craft needs its own jargon to confuse those who are "less learned", Cooper wastes no time creating one. His frequent use of less-familiar terms for the sake of exactness is distracting and weakens the effectiveness of his message. Here are a few examples: "Interaction design" instead of "user interface design"
"aphorism" and "axiom" instead of "principle"
"Subject Matter Experts" instead of "expert users"
"Ethnographic Interviews" instead of just "interviews"
"Personas" instead of "user profiles" The list goes on and on. Almost every other page introduces some new or uncommon term to be included in the jargon to be used by this new profession that Cooper wants to create. Personally, I think this book makes some really good points that deserve to be heard. Unfortunately, those "tender morsels" are buried in so much diatribe that most of the people who read the book are likely to miss them. I hope the authors get busy soon on a "About Face 3.0" edition that eliminates at least a third of the text and replaces the academic "high-brow" vernacular with common words and phrases that are already in common use. They also need to provide more examples of potential solutions to the problems that they point out. In the meantime, I can't honestly recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Book on Interaction Design
Review: even as a 14 year veteran of interaction design, i learned much more than i would have imagined. well written, well organized, full of great insights.
Rating:
Summary: Great author. Awful book.
Review: I loved "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum", and bought "About Face" looking for some concrete examples of how to implement its ideas. Unfortunately, all of Cooper's concrete ideas are just awful. Half of them would require strong AI in order to implement, and many of them would actually require the computer to have psychic powers. For instance, he spends a lot of time explaining that programs need to be written to assume that users will make mistakes (because they will), rather than considering mistakes to be a break in the workflow. Sure, sounds good. But then later on, he suggests that if the user of an accounting system enters a record with an invalid account number, the computer should just assume that it's actually a valid account number that the user just hasn't told it about yet. And worse, he suggests that the system should accept it *silently*, and not tell the user that anything at all odd happened until it gets around to generating the end-of-month report and there's still no matching account number. Can you imagine the user of such a system, when the computer finally tells him that *a month ago*, he made a typo while entering a record, and now he has to go digging through paper records (assuming he still even has them) to find the correct information? It's the same thing with many of his other examples. He suggests ways for the computer to be "smart" that are clearly smart in the very specific cases he's thinking of, but often dumber than before in every other case.
Rating:
Summary: If I were king, you would *have* to read this book
Review: I've been waiting for this book since I first heard about it from a friend last year. Now it's here and it's proving to be worth the wait. What I need to figure out now is, how can I make the designers of every software program I'll ever use read this book? Hats off to Cooper and Reimann. You would think that their axioms are common sense, like "Never scroll text horizontally", or "If it's worth the user entering, it's worth the program remembering". But if those common sense ideas were actually common, why is there so much horrid software out there?
Rating:
Summary: There's more to give for the user than rtfm
Review: I've read the book once, and I'll read it again. So will my colleagues. The authors had done a very good job gathering together the high-level problems concerning user interface (or user interaction) desing. They don't provide out-of-box solutions to every existing usability problem, but designing an interface is not like boolean logic. The book introduces some new terms, to me that's fine. For example, "user profile" or "user role" is not the same as "persona", as the authors state in p. 61. It's a design tool for their design process, and the meaning behind the terms should not be considered the same. We're propably going to apply this book's methods in our organization. But we're also going to use usability professionals. After all, we all have a developer background too. Some developers might think that the book has an offensive attitude against them, as seen in other reviews. Hopefully in version 3.0 the authors find words that would be easier to swallow also for the people who actually do the coding. Then I'd rate it five stars.
Rating: 
Summary: I would give it zero stars if I could.
Review: If you want a good example of how NOT to write a book, than this is it. It's unfortunate that Cooper and Reimann chose to take the condescending, developers are evil approach when trying to make their point because all it did was alienate me as a reader. As an example, in their discussions regarding scrollbars (page 360), they say "In many cases, though, it is used inappropriately only because designers and programmers don't have any better ideas. That's a poor rationale for any aspect of software design." What they are really saying is "You didn't invent something new, therefore, you suck." Or how about in the Chapter 34, Notifying and Confirming (page 449), the quote "Promise that you won't ever create one of these, please?" OK, I'll promise to never create one of these if the authors promise to never write another book. It is my opinion that 70% of this book is a waste of paper and served no other purpose than to get the page count up to justify the price. Also, the authors seem to get some perverse enjoyment out of using obscure and unrecognizable words in order to sound more intelligent and give their book a college textbook feel. And the lack of examples for many of the problems they cite is inexcusable. If you're going to bring up a problem, then offer up a solution. Many times they fail to do this. It's unfortunate that the authors failed so miserably in the delivery of their message because of their overall poor writing style since they do bring up some valid points. As a developer, I agree that software in general has to be made more user-friendly and have seen first hand many of the problems the authors cite throughout the book. I think they would have succeeded in bringing more developers around to their way of thinking if they would have just changed the delivery of their message. One thing that will come from reading this book is that in the future, I will refrain from purchasing any book authored by Cooper and/or Reimann.
Rating:
Summary: Incredible Book
Review: It seems that most reviews on this book are from software developers, which is why they are so negative. I manage a web development company that concentrates on easy to use websites. From my perspective the ideas and methods are by far the best out there. His main point is that software developers should not create the interfaces we use. This is an important statement that many people need to understand. The software engineer can't design an interface when he/she has no interaction with the users. Even further, it takes a different mindset to create an interface than it does to code. You can't blame the author for setting things straight. What you can do is maybe blame the books stores for putting it in the wrong section. It looks as though too many developers are reading this book for insight.
Rating: 
Summary: No hay color
Review: Los dos anteriores libros de Cooper son magníficos: por concretos, directos y enfocados. En About Face se habla de problemas de usanza relacionados con pobres prácticas de diseño; y en "Inmates..." se establece un método razonable para tratar con "usuarios no-elásticos". Ambos son rotundos. Y divertidos. Y prácticos (yo utilizo algunas de sus técnicas en Diseño Contextual y de Interacción). About Face 2.0, sin embargo, sólo añade explicaciones innecesarias al About Face original, pues parece que se quiere formalizar un área que antes se había descrito precisamente como no formalizable, y se desprende un cierto tufillo academicista que no le hace justicia a las ideas de Cooper, expuestas muchas veces en conferencias. Así que, igual que con Meyer, sigo recomendando la primera edición, que con todo quedó algo atrasada (pero sus ideas siguen siendo magníficas para adquirir criterio).
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