About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design

"The following description is for the second edition of About Face. The 3rd Edtion, About Face 3 (ISBN 0470084111), is now available."

First published seven years ago-just before the World Wide Web exploded into dominance in the software world-About Face rapidly became a bestseller. While the ideas and principles in the original book remain as relevant as ever, the examples in About Face 2.0 are updated to reflect the evolution of the Web.

Interaction Design professionals are constantly seeking to ensure that software and software-enabled products are developed with the end-user's goals in mind, that is, to make them more powerful and enjoyable for people who use them. About Face 2.0 ensures that these objectives are met with the utmost ease and efficiency.

Alan Cooper (Palo Alto, CA) has spent a decade making high-tech products easier to use and less expensive to build-a practice known as "Interaction Design." Cooper is now the leader in this growing field. Mr. Cooper is also the author of two bestselling books that are widely considered indispensable texts. About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design, intro-duced the first comprehensive set of practical design principles. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum explains how talented people and companies continually create aggravating high-tech products that fail to meet customer expectations.

Robert Reimann has spent the past 15 years pushing the boundaries of digital products as a designer, writer, lecturer, and consultant. He has led dozens of interaction design projects in domains including e-commerce, portals, desktop productivity, authoring environments, medical and scientific instrumentation, wireless, and handheld devices for startups and Fortune 500 clients alike. Joining Cooper in 1996, Reimann led the development and refinement of many goal-directed design methods described in About Face 2.0. He has lectured on these methods at major universities and to international industry audiences. He is a member of the advisory board of the UC Berkeley Institute of Design.

Alan Cooper is a pioneering software inventor, programmer, designer, and theorist. He is credited with creating what many regard as the first serious business software for microcomputers, and is widely known as the "Father of Visual Basic." For the last decade, Alan’s interaction design consulting firm, Cooper, has helped companies invent powerful, usable, desirable software and improve digital product behavior through the use of Alan’s unique methodology – the Goal-Directed process. A cornerstone of this method, the use of personas, has been widely adopted since it was first described in Alan’s second book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum. A best-selling author and popular speaker, Alan is a tireless advocate for integrating design into business practice and for humanizing technology.

Robert Reimann has spent the past 15 years pushing the boundaries of digital products as a designer, writer, lecturer, and consultant. He has led dozens of design consulting projects for startups and Fortune 500 clients alike. Upon joining Cooper in 1996, Robert led the development and refinement of many Goal-Directed Design methods described in About Face 2.0. He has lectur ed at major universities and to international industry audiences, and he is a member of the industry advisory board for the Institute of Design at the University of California, Berkeley.