The User Interface: Concepts & Design

Written for programmers, user interface designers, and industrial engineers, this book is a highly practical and informative account of user interface design. The book progresses from concepts in basic design through to general user interface design and concludes with a focus on computer user interface design.

This comprehensive classroom text is designed to introduce the variety of issues and ideas involved with the creation of user interfaces (UI) in application development. Students of UI creation, formal or otherwise, should add this to their essential reading list.

Each chapter contains a series of exercises to test your knowledge of the covered topics. These exercises are interesting throughout, calling upon the reader to apply the ideas of the chapter to real-world scenarios. In addition, the ideas of each chapter are demonstrated through amusing dialogues between two characters, Hemelsworth and his butler, Barker, who serve as metaphors for the user and the application.

Although some portions of the book seem outdated, the true value of this text is its presentation of the theoretical and the conceptual. You won't find any 32-bit Windows advice, but the lessons you learn about design will be applicable anywhere.