Interaction Design

Rating:
Summary: The best text we have for this area.
Review: I have successfully used this book as the major text in both undergraduate and post graduate HCI and Interaction Design subjects. I am grateful that is available as it is by far the best text available for these subjects. It is particularly strong on the social and contextual issues that are so fundamental to the design of robust and usable technology and are often so difficult to convey to students who lack real design experience.

It is well organised, very clearly written and provides many useful examples and practical exercises. These are all designed to make some very complex material accessible to readers whatever their knowledge of the field. I have also used some of the support material that is available for those teaching from this text. It is designed in such a way that it can be easily incorporated into existing course material and has saved me a lot of time!

Rating:
Summary: Good applied university text or cutting-edge industry guide
Review: I like this book as much as any on my list of recommended readings (I liked it enough to write the foreword). While not as comprehensive as some books, it makes what I think is a good depth/breadth tradeoff. It goes into enough detail on core topics that practitioners can use it as a guidebook. It has the pedagogical features that I like to see in a textbook (outlines, summaries, bibliography). I think will be motivating to students and understandable to a wide audience, which is important to be useful and usable by multidisciplinary teams.

The book has a website, as should any book in the new millennium, [local website], which contains materials for students, teachers, and practitioners.

Several chapters are excellent standalone surveys on topics such as design and evaluation, making the book valuable as a reference....

Rating:
Summary: Too much padding
Review: It would be user-friendly if the content was concise. The book simply violates the basic principle of design: make it simple!

Rating:
Summary: Good academic text
Review: Overall very pleased with the new book. I see this more as a revision of Preece's early book on HCI but thankfully with less emphasis on the physiological aspects of HCI and still not to vague and soft on the practicalities. For the first time, I would consider this as a front-line undergraduate text though as with all books on HCI, it needs to be backed up with comprehensive readings and slides for inclass use. The latter is reasonably well covered and the former can be acquired through the biblio and ACM (please ACM Digital Library - make readings available free!).
Several excellent chapters particularly on evaluation and peppered with useful and interesting case-studies.

Rating:
Summary: Too much padding
Review: The book is long-winded and filled with copious padding stuff. The authors seem forgot the basic design principle. It is extremely annoying to read the same material again and again on the same page and in different chapters, especially when the material covered is already common sense in nature.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Course Text for HCI students
Review: The breath and depth of this text truly embodies the necessary content for beginning HCI students in an undergraduate and graduate program. I've successfully used this text every semester with my students since its inception. The author's perspective of the discipline accurately reflects an increasing trend in HCI education that places less emphasis on computing and more on designing products to enhance human communication based on the social sciences. It is organized to provide an instructor a way to pick and choose selected chapters or proceed sequentially. Each chapter is multi-dimensional in its approach to provide an array of content that includes both theory and practice. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Required for anyone who is serious about interface design
Review: The field of interface and interaction design is formally known as Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). It is significant that a large amount of HCI deals with non-programming issues such as psychological approaches to end-user experience, social manners of the audience, and more. Interaction Design and The Essential Guide to User Interface Design provide a comprehensive overview of the essentials of interface design.

Beyond Interaction Design is an important book for designing effective and capable interfaces to software applications.

Interaction Design is a meat and potatoes book about HCI. Rather than focusing on the software that drives the application, the book analyzes how users actually interact with the system. This interaction is what ultimately will determine whether a system is successful or unproductive.

The book provides a comprehensive look at the entire set of requirements involved with design. The authors show that there is much more to systems design than end-user requirements and CGI scripts. Effective HCI is a multi-disciplinary area including psychology, sociology, anthropology, information systems, and computer science.

The authors write that their book is called "Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction" because it is concerned with the broader scope of issues, topics, and paradigms than has been traditionally written in other books. The book notes that there has never been a greater need for interactions designers and usability engineers to develop current and next-generation interaction technologies. To be successful in the interface design game, programmers need a mixed set of skills, which is not an easy task.

Interaction Design comprises 15 densely packed chapters that integrate all of the various cognitive, social, and other issues that are germane to interaction design. Chapter 1 provides an overview of what makes for good and bad design. Chapter 3 gets into the psychological aspect of HCI and looks at cognition and how users interact with the systems they implement. None of the book makes for easy reading, as the topics at hand are often multifaceted and complex. Chapter 6 deals with the process of interaction design and for the most part ends the psychological approach, while Chapters 7 through 10 deal with the actual design of the system.

The book has a number of real-world case studies, and also includes interviews with various authorities on HCI. However, it does not get into specific technologies (Solaris, Linux, etc.). Also, each chapter concludes with a number of references, which can be used as a launching pad for more information.

I highly recommend Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction for anyone who is serious about interface design. Your users will appreciate it.