- Paperback: 580 pages
- Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (11 Aug 1995)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1568843224
- ISBN-13: 978-1568843223
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 18.3 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 89,961 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
The cleverest code in the world is worth nothing if a program′s interface proves an unwieldy barrier to users. That′s why programmers and designers alike will benefit from About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design. Here, respected software designer Alan Cooper shares his own real–world experience and design principles so that you, too, can fashion intuitive, effective user interfaces. Applicable to multimedia and Web sites as well as application software, About Face is an invaluable resource for design professionals.
About the Author
About the Author Alan Cooper is one of the most respected software designers of our time. He is the winner of the Microsoft Windows Pioneer Award for his work in designing Visual Basic. He is also one of the most outspoken critics of how the software industry goes about building the interface between products and people. His thirteen–year–old software design consulting company, Cooper Interaction Design, is based in Palo Alto, CA.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
This book has a simple premise: If achieving the user's goals is the basis of our user interface design, then the user will be satisfied and happy. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
This book has a simple premise: If achieving the user's goals is the basis of our user interface design, then the user will be satisfied and happy. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The most important book written about UI design so far,
By
This review is from: About Face: Essentials of Window Interface Design (Paperback)
Cooper's first book is still his best one, much better than the "upgraded" About Face 2.0. His ideas were revolutionary back in 1995, and most of them are still waiting to be taken into use in the software industry.However, this book's main benefit is not about how to *do* UI design but rather the attitude: why do UI design, what's wrong with the current UIs etc. The attitude is 100% correct and sadly missing from most of the textbooks about UI design. Cooper gives out his ideas about what should be fixed in most cases without a solution and he doesn't justify them properly, but even pointing out the problems has more value than approximately 5 standard UI design textbooks put together. In the middle of the book there is a large amount (~ 100 pages) of rather boring interaction detail advice that you should probably just glance through, but for example chapters 13, 27, 28 and 34 are pure diamond - you should probably buy the book just to read them. I completely stand with the relevancy rating of the chapters my wife Sari put in the web already back in 1999, and I won't repeat it here: just type in "lukuohje about face" in Google to find it. In summary, my advice is that if you decide to read just one book about UI design, read this one and forget Nielsen, Shneiderman, Norman and others. If you understand the attitude and ideas, it will change your life: you can never look at UI design in the way you did before.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Incisive, invaluable, heavy on Windows. Buy this...and Tog.,
By A Customer
This review is from: About Face: Essentials of Window Interface Design (Paperback)
Reading this book really will make you wonder why most computer users don't storm software companies with torches and polearms every day. It will also make Mac users wonder if Alan Cooper ever seriously sat down and worked with a Macintosh. A surprising number of his Windows wish-list items are already integrated into the Mac OS. "About Face" is heavily Windows-centric -- almost entirely so.But not completely. Cooper's intended audience of programmers will find his insights invaluable for development on any and every platform. He's a Windows developer, so he writes in his native terms -- as does Bruce Tognazzini in "Tog on Interface," a Mac-centric volume which should be in a boxed set with "About Face." Neither, fortunately, engages in platform-bashing; each of these authors freely criticizes the shortcomings of his familiar OS. "About Face" goes from sweeping design principles to nuts-and-bolts detail (wherein lies the Windows-centricity), all in pursuit of his (utterly correct) Holy Grail: Make the software convenient for the user, not for the computer. The most heinous "computer crimes" are perpetrated carelessly, even with good intentions, by commercial software programmers who focus on the computer instead of on the human who uses it. The victims of these crimes go almost entirely unheard, hardly even realizing they've been wronged. Alan Cooper is the interface police -- and he comes not a moment too soon.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A promising "alpha" draft,
By A Customer
This review is from: About Face: Essentials of Window Interface Design (Paperback)
This book leaves me with extremely mixed feelings. It makes some reall good points and paints some very good examples. On the other hand, it is much too thick, by which I mean that there is too much redundancy in it. Sometiems I'd realize that the last couple pages coupld have been said (better) in a single paragraph. I also felt he presented his points badly. Often, his presentation pattern is: "assert, talk, explain why he asserted, back up assertion" or something like that. This made me say "This is idiocy!" only to find, (say) 10 pages later that he had good reasons for making the assertion. If this presentation order were reversed, I think he would sound more credible and be more convincing. There are other minor flaws: too many places where opinion is presented as fact, a lot of "Gosh, why are folks so stupid that they haven't produced quasi-smart gadgets like this?" when it is by no means clear that such things can actually be d! one, realistically. He never mentions who the audience for his suggestions are (presumably the average computer user doing the average thing). Yet, ihs blanket statements can't possibly be applied to all classes of software and users this simply. Having said all that, I'll repeat the opening: there are a lot of good ideas here. If this were software, I'd call this an alpha: it has all the right stuff, but it just needs cleaning up and debugging. I hope there is a second, significantly revised, version of the book done at some point.
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