Søren Lauesen
Addison-Wesley, 2004
ISBN 0321181433
Buy it from Amazon.com
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk
"There are thousands of books on programming. Common to all those I have seen is that the user interface is rather unimportant - it is just a matter of input to and output from the program.... There are a few dozen books on HCI. They tell a lot about human psychology... [but] say very little about the actual design of real-life user interfaces."
It's interesting to see a detailed practical cookbook from the HCI domain, as there is plainly a significant overlap with requirements work. This textbook is clearly also a huge amount of work from one author, based on a lifetime of experience; and it is all the more remarkable coming from someone who has also written a requirements textbook! Lauesen is as always clear, practical and helpful, taking care to explain things even when they might seem obvious (that's where the reader's assumptions are).
The book is a detailed step-by-step guide to designing user interfaces. It looks (to someone from outside that domain, except in a very small way) like a valuable text for students, and a helpful reference for novice HCI designers.
Each chapter begins with a summary and 'highlights'; the chapter body supports the text with plenty of graphics, tables, and screenshots; at the end there is a 'test yourself' list of a dozen questions (when appropriate). There are design exercises at the back, covering all the chapters, and four 'projects' for further study. There's even a formidable '4-hour written exam' paper. But answers are not provided.
Part A covers classic Usability, Prototyping & Iterative Design, Data Presentation, and Mental Models, with illustrated theory on what works for the human brain and what doesn't.
Part B, Systematic Interface Design, covers Analysis, Virtual Window Design, Function Design, Prototyping, and reflection on User Interface Design.
Part C, unexcitingly titled Supplementary design issues, looks at more advanced stuff, giving detailed examples, and covering issues such as user support, usability testing, heuristic evaluation (ie 'someone looks at the user interface and identifies the problems'), systems development and data modelling.
There is a wonderful analysis of 'an error message from Microsoft Word' (97 in fact), using the book's Heuristic Rules to good effect. When you have put in an invalid line measurement (eg if you type in '0.5 lines' rather than '0.5li'), which you aren't prevented from doing, you get the scary warning "This is not a valid measurement", complete with bright yellow warning triangle containing a big exclamation mark -- an oddity, as the rest of Word 97 is pretty friendly. It fails on at least 5 of 9 heuristics, and some of the others are a bit doubtful too.
Are you sure your system will work better than that? If not, let Lauesen be your doctor.
The book is well-organised and indexed, with a specially good bibliography that summarises the message of each book or paper. It feels quite different from other HCI books. Perhaps that's because it's so much more practical.
© Ian Alexander 2005 You may also like:
