Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design and Development - Softcover

Torres, R.J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0130912964 ISBN 13: 9780130912961

Publisher: Prentice Hall, 2001

Synopsis

Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design and Development illuminates today's best practices for user interface design, usability, and user-centered development. Robert J. Torres introduces clear principles, specific guidelines, and practical heuristics for every stage of UI development: planning, tool selection, user profiling, task analysis, design, simulation, prototyping, implementation, evaluation, iteration, deployment, and beyond.

About this title

About the Author

ROBERT J. TORRES is an IBM Certified IT Specialist and Senior Consultant in IBM's National Usability Engineering Practice with over 30 years of experience in IT technical and management positions. His recent work with IBM and industry clients has involved suite-level software development and migration planning, leading and performing software design and prototyping, defining development processes, creating prescriptive style guides for consistency, integration, and usability, Web software development, and usability evaluation.

From the Back Cover

The complete, practical handbook for effective UI design, development, and usability engineering.

Using extensive practical examples, the Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design and Development illuminates today's best practices for user interface design, usability, and user-centered development. Robert J. Torres introduces user interfaces from three points of view: the user, the developer, and the system. Next, he introduces a complete user-centered UI development process, beginning at the highest level and then drilling down to each phase of the lifecycle. For every stage, Torres offers clear principles, specific guidelines, and practical heuristics for self-assessment. Coverage includes:

• Planning, user/task analysis, and user profiling
• Conceptual design, high-level design, and detailed design
• Simulation and prototyping
• Implementation, evaluation, iteration, and deployment
• Risk management in user interface development
• Choosing the optimal tools for building and managing user interfaces
• Understanding the role of managers and project leaders in UI development

Whether you're a developer, project manager, usability specialist, IT manager, software customer, or researcher, Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design and Development will be your definitive resource for building great user interfaces.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface

Although there are a large number of software products in the world today, the number of software user interfaces with high usability is painfully small. Furthermore, the number of software products with overall high usability is even smaller. These days, as in the past, it takes more than just a pretty interface to achieve high and competitive overall user satisfaction. An aesthetic interface with in-depth character is what users, customers, and business sponsors are seeking.

This is a daunting task for software designers and developers who are under constant pressure to reduce product cost, reduce development time, deliver increasing features, and improve quality relative to competition in a rapidly changing world wide environment. People in the software development business today (and in particular, those focusing on user interface and usability) must approach the job with caution and humility - there are lots of things to learn and do very quickly and effectively. No one person has all the answers to deal with so many simultaneous and competing challenges.

The primary goals for this book are to Make essential distinctions between the overall usability of a software product and its user interface. Overall usability is a function of many parameters that must be accounted for and user interface is only one factor. Provide very practical, specific, effective, and "best practice" guidance and techniques to achieve software products and user interfaces on schedule, with high overall usability, and with high user satisfaction. The guidance and techniques are provided in a way that is immediately applicable to current software user interface projects.

The focus of the text is on application software user interfaces, which is where the majority of user interface work exists. However, the techniques are applicable to development of software user interfaces for operating systems. In a more general sense, the general concepts are applicable to user interfaces of systems of different types.

Let's begin by discussing the task, the audience, and criteria that this text addresses. The Task

Of course, the task that is explored in depth is that of planning, designing, constructing, validating, and deploying user interface software that meets requirements and helps achieve product goals for the user interface and usability in general. Each key subtask is described, rules of thumb (heuristics) provided, and examples explored. The intent is to provide effective guidance to achieve effective results. The guidance provided is typically not described in any other publication. Guidance in the text is experience-based and derived from a large number of projects, i.e., the school of hard knocks. The Audience

There are several intended users of this information. Product personnel responsible for user interface planning, requirements analysis, design, online help, performance support, tutorials, and training Product personnel responsible for implementing all aspects of a product user interface, including implementation design, construction, and test Product personnel responsible for evaluating the usability of software user interfaces, help, performance support, tutorials, and the overall usability of product software Development Managers responsible for planning and tracking software development and the effectiveness of results Measurable Criteria

A major objective is to guide a software developer who understands the basics of user interface development to design and implement better user interfaces more effectively. Designing a better user interface means achieving higher usability and user satisfaction than was achieved prior to using this text or any other text or source of guidance. Achieving the result more effectively means producing a better user interface faster, on or ahead of schedule, with fewer user interface and usability defects, on larger product feature sets, and with fewer resources than before.

In addition, this book is intended to be a more complete reference for user interface design and development than others available.

Edition details

• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0130912964
• ISBN 13: 9780130912961
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 396