Coordinating User Interfaces for Consistency (Interactive Technologies) [Paperback]

What the critics say about Jakob Nielsen "The world's leading expert on Web usability " -- U.S. News & World Report "The king of usability" -- Internet Magazine "Perhaps the best-known design and usability guru on the Internet" -- Financial Times "The guru of Web page usability" -- The New York Times "One of the world's foremost experts in Web usability" -- Business Week

In the years since Jakob Nielsen's classic collection on interface consistency first appeared, much has changed, and much has stayed the same. On the one hand, there's been exponential growth in the opportunities for following or disregarding the principles of interface consistency-more computers, more applications, more users, and of course the vast expanse of the Web. On the other, there are the principles themselves, as persistent and as valuable as ever. In these contributed chapters, you'll find details on many methods for seeking and enforcing consistency, along with bottom-line analyses of its benefits and some warnings about its possible dangers. Most of what you'll learn applies equally to hardware and software development, and all of it holds real benefits for both your organization and your users. It begins with a new preface by the collection's distinguished editor. It details a variety of methods for attaining interface consistency, including central control, user definitions, exemplary applications, shared code, and model analysis. It presents a cost-benefits analysis of organizational efforts to promote and achieve consistency. It examines and appraises the dimensions of consistency-consistency within an application, across a family of applications, and beyond. It makes the case for some unexpected benefits of interface consistency while helping you avoid the risks it can sometimes entail. It considers the consistency of interface elements other than screen design. It includes case studies of major corporations that have instituted programs to ensure the consistency of their products.

An Oldie but Still a Goodie
Sure, this book is very old for a computer book, having been published in 1989. But since the book is about design project management and not about technology, it has held up very well. In fact, with the growth of the Web, the need for consistent interface design and for methods to get designers to follow guidelines is stronger than ever. The book has several classic chapters like Bruce Tognazzini's explanation of how Apple ensured consistent user interfaces for the Mac (Tog was Apple's human interface evangelist at the time; he is now the lead Web designer for Healtheon), Dan Rosenberg's analysis of how to estimate the cost-benefit trade-offs in establishing a corporate design standard (Dan was head of UI for Ashton-Tate at the time; he is now head of UI for Oracle), Richard Wolf's chapter on usability as process (Richard was design lead for Lotus 1-2-3 at the time; he is now a program manager for Microsoft Office), and Wendy Kellogg's conceptual analysis of the meanin! ! g of consistency (Wendy is the only contributor to have the same job: Big Blue). --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Called the world's leading expert on Web usability by US News and World Report, Jakob Nielsen today serves as user advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group. In the course of a career in which he held influential positions at Sun Microsystems, Bellcore, and IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, Nielsen founded the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. He holds 58 US patents, many of which focus on ways to make the Internet easier to use. He has written the Alertbox column on Web usability since 1995 and is the author of Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity and Usability Engineering, plus eight other books.