The book "Interface. Basics of interaction design. 4th ed.
Hi, Habrozhiteli! We have published a long-awaited book:
Alan Cooper began work on the first edition of this book 20 years ago. He urged programmers that it was time to step forward to meet users and start writing programs that they would like. Nowadays, a completely different situation has arisen - the digitization of all types of information has forced users to plunge into new technologies. The fourth edition of the book takes into account all the changes in the industry over the past seven years, while preserving all the ideas from previous editions that have not lost their relevance.
Interaction design is a human-centered approach for designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services. Much attention is paid to the design of behavior - an aspect that traditional design disciplines are often neglected.
This book focuses on the goal-oriented approach, in which the focus of designers focuses on the goals of users (that is, on the reasons for which they use this product), on their expectations, worldview and inclinations. That it allows you to create powerful solutions that are pleasant to work with.
This book is dedicated to interaction design — the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services. Like most design disciplines, interaction design is primarily focused on form. Nonetheless, first and foremost, interaction design focuses on an aspect that is rarely paid attention to in traditional design disciplines: behavior design.
')
As a rule, design influences human behavior: architecture is focused on the use of physical space by people, and graphic design often tries to stimulate a certain reaction. But now, with the ubiquitous spread of high-tech products - from computers to cars, from phones to home appliances - the products being created are increasingly showing complex behavior.
Take at least such a simple product as a stove. Before the digital age, it was easy to manage it: it was enough to turn one knob to the desired position. The handle was marked on the handle to select the mode: one for shutdown and several tags for specific temperatures. Every time the handle turned in a certain position, the same thing always happened. Of course, it is possible to call this “behavior”, but of course, this is a very simple behavior.
Compare with modern plates equipped with microprocessors, LCD indicators and embedded operating systems. On the control panel are buttons with inscriptions that are not related to cooking: “Start”, “Cancel”, “Program”, as well as (probably more expected) buttons “Baking” and “Grill”. What happens when you press one of these buttons is much harder to predict than when you turn the knob on an old gas stove. Moreover, the result of pressing one of these buttons often depends on the mode of operation of the plate, as well as on which buttons were pressed before. This is what is meant by "complex behavior."
The emergence of products with complex behavior has generated a new discipline. Interaction design adopts theory and techniques from traditional design, usability and engineering disciplines. However, the result is more than the sum of the parts; He has his own unique methods and techniques. And it is worth noting that the design of the interaction belongs to the field of design, markedly different from the scientific and engineering disciplines of activity. Although the analytical method is used in the design of interaction where it is necessary, the synthesis and the desire to predict the future state of affairs (not limited to the current state) play an equally important role in it.
Interaction design is essentially human-centered. To the greatest extent, it seeks to meet the needs and wishes of people interacting with a product or service. These goals and needs are most clearly expressed as narrations - logical and emotional sequences of events. In response to these user stories, digital products must present their behavioral narratives, ensuring proper response, not only at the level of logic, data entry and presentation, but also at a more human level.
This book discusses the specific approach to interaction, which we call the goal-oriented approach. It was found that when designers focus on the goals of users (that is, on the reasons for which they use this product), on their expectations, world view and inclinations, they manage to create powerful solutions that are pleasant to work with.
Even a casual observer of technology development will notice that interactive products are quickly becoming more complex. If a mechanical device can have a dozen visible states, then a digital product can support thousands of states (or even more!). This complexity can turn into a nightmare for both users and developers. To prevent complexity from getting out of control, it is necessary to act systematically and rationally. This does not mean that creativity and ingenuity are not encouraged - on the contrary, it turned out that systematicity helps to more clearly identify opportunities for the application of revolutionary thinking and helps to evaluate the effectiveness of ideas.
According to Gestalt theory, people perceive objects not as a combination of individual features and attributes, but as a single entity in relation to its environment. As a result, an interactive product cannot be effectively designed by expanding it into a list of atomic requirements and proposing a solution for each item. Even a relatively simple product must be considered in its entirety and in the light of its context in the world. And again it turns out that a systematic approach contributes to the formation of a holistic perception, which is necessary to create products that are useful and exciting in the opinion of their users.
In this book, we have tried to provide the reader with effective and practical tools for designing interaction. This toolkit consists of principles, patterns, and processes. Design principles cover general ideas about design practice, as well as rules and recommendations on how best to use specific user interface idioms and interaction design. Design patterns describe sets of interaction design idioms that are often used to resolve specific user requirements and requests. Design processes describe how to understand and define user requirements, how to translate them into the structural basis of a project, and finally, how best to apply design principles and patterns in a particular context.
Literature on the principles and patterns of design exists, but the design processes are mentioned in books rarely, and even less often the interaction of all three tools to obtain effective results is considered. We have tried to write a book in which all three components are brought together. This book will teach you how to create more efficient and useful dialog boxes and menus, but it will also help you understand how users perceive your digital product and interact with it. She also explains how to use this information during the design process.
Integration of principles, processes and design patterns plays a key role in designing effective interaction with the product and the interface. “Objectively good” user interfaces do not exist. The quality depends on the context: who the user of your product is, what it does, what motives it guides. The use of a single set of “for all occasions” principles simplifies the creation of a user interface, but does not always lead to a better end result. Anyone who wants to create good solutions will inevitably have to work hard to truly understand the people who will interact with the product. Only in this case, the tools of principles and patterns used in specific situations will bring real benefits. We hope this book will push you to better understand the needs of the users of your product, and teach you how to transform this understanding into a better product.
This book does not attempt to provide some kind of style guide or set of standards for building an interface. Moreover, in Chapter 17, you will learn about the limited capabilities of such tools. However, we hope that the processes and principles described in the book will be well combined with the style guide that you have chosen for yourself. Style guides help find the answer to the “what?” Question, but usually do poorly with the answer to the “why?” Question. Our book tries to answer these questions.
The book covers four main steps in designing interactive systems: studying the subject area, analyzing users and their requirements, determining the structural basis of the solution, and working out the details. Many practitioners add the fifth step to these four steps: verification, that is, testing the effectiveness of the solution on users. This is part of the discipline commonly known as usability.
Verification is an important and worthy component of many interaction design initiatives, but it is a fairly independent discipline and practice. Testing and usability testing are briefly discussed in Chapter 5. We also recommend that you refer to a sufficiently significant and continuously growing volume of usability literature for more detailed information on how to conduct and analyze usability tests.
The main ideas of the book are summarized in a simple and convenient structure. The book is divided into three parts:
Part I provides a detailed description of the process of goal-oriented design, and also discusses the issues of building design teams and integrating with project implementation teams.
Part II deals with high-level principles that can be applied to any interaction design task on virtually any platform.
Part III deals with low-level and platform-specific idioms and interface design principles for mobile devices, desktops, web services, etc.
In June 2007, just two months after the release of the third edition of the book, Apple once and for all changed the field of digital technology by launching iPhone and iOS. In 2010, the first commercially successful tablet computer, the iPad, was released. These devices, equipped with a touch screen and sensors, and the competing products that followed, complemented the language of interaction with a completely new lexicon of idioms and design patterns. The fourth edition of the book discusses these and other interaction idioms.
The new edition has preserved what remained true; updated what has changed; and a new material has appeared reflecting changes in the industry over the past seven years. The book also discusses new concepts that we developed in practice, taking into account the era of change.
The following is a brief summary of the major changes in this edition:
- The material was reorganized and systematized so that the structure and the sequence of presentation became more compact and convenient. Some chapters were rearranged, others merged, some were reduced, and several new chapters also appeared.
- Terminology and examples have been updated to reflect the current state of the industry. The entire text was carefully crafted to make the book more readable and better read.
- In Part I, the process of goal-oriented design is described in more detail and more accurately reflects the most modern practice in Cooper. Also included is additional information on building a design team and integrating with the development team and the project team.
- Part II has undergone significant processing for a more clear presentation of the basic concepts and principles. Also added updated material on the integration of visual design.
- Part III was overhauled, updated and expanded in accordance with the specifics of new mobile and touch platforms and interaction idioms, with a more detailed description of web interaction and interaction with other types of devices and systems.
We hope that with these additions and changes the book will become an even more useful and relevant source of information than previous editions.
Although the subject of discussion is mainly focused on students and practitioners in the field of interaction design, the book is of interest to anyone interested in user interaction with digital technologies. Developers and designers of all kinds involved in the design of digital products, usability professionals, project managers - all of them will find something useful in the book. Readers of previous editions of "About the Interface" or the book "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum" (published by Sams, 2004) will find here new and updated information about the methods and principles of design.
We hope the book turned out to be informative and interesting. But above all, we hope that it will force you to take a fresh look at the process of designing digital products. The practice of interaction design is constantly evolving, and now it is new enough and diverse enough to generate quite diverse opinions on the topic. If you have an interesting opinion or just want to talk, we will be happy to receive a message from you. You can contact us at alan@cooper.com, rmreimann@gmail.com, davcron@gmail.com or chrisnoessel@gmail.com.
Alan Cooper has been one of the innovators in the software world for over 40 years. His ideas and today continue to influence the new generation of developers, entrepreneurs and professionals in the field of user interaction.
Alan opened his first company in 1976 and created a product that was called "the first serious commercial program for microcomputers." In 1988, he invented a dynamically expanding visual programming environment and sold it to Bill Gates, who released it under the name Visual Basic. For this achievement, Alan was called "the father of Visual Basic."
In 1992, Alan and his wife Sue jointly founded the first consulting firm Cooper, which worked in the field of interaction design. By 1997, Cooper had developed basic design methods, which are now generally accepted. The concept of characters that Alan invented and then popularized in his two best-selling books, “About Face” and “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum”, is almost universally applied by experts in the field of user interaction.
Today, Alan continues to advocate for the humanization of technology from his farm in the hilly terrain north of San Francisco.
Robert Reiman spent more than 20 years developing digital capabilities as a designer, writer, strategist, and consultant. He led dozens of desktop, mobile, network, and embedded projects in the consumer, commercial, scientific, and professional sectors for both start-ups and giants on the Fortune 500 list.
Robert, one of the first designers at Cooper, led the development and improvement of many goal-oriented design methods described in the book. In 2005, he became the founding president of the IxDA Association for Interaction Design (www.ixda.org). He also led the user interaction groups at Cooper, Bose, frog and Sonos, and currently works as the lead interaction designer for the PatientsLikeMe network.
David Cronin works as the head of the engineering service at GE and is part of the design and customer management team at GE. Prior to that, he was director of interaction design at Smart Design Studios in San Francisco and was the first director of interaction design at Cooper.
David has been involved in product design for surgeons, museum visitors, financial brokers, nurses, drivers, dentists, financial analysts, radiologists, maintenance engineers, production planners, marketers, video operators and people with chronic illnesses. While working at Cooper, he made a notable contribution to the development of principles, patterns and practical techniques of goal-oriented design.
Christopher Nossel develops products, services and strategies in the consumer and financial sectors, as well as in the health sector, holding the position of Lead Specialist at Cooper. He participated in the long-term planning of measures to combat terrorism, built prototypes of new technologies for Microsoft, and also worked in the direction of telemedicine.
Prior to joining Cooper, Chris founded a small interaction design agency, where he was involved in the development of exhibitions and museum exhibits. He was also the director of information technology at marchFIRST, where he participated in the creation of the Innovation Center for Interaction Design. In 2012, Chris became one of the co-authors of Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction. His work is regularly published in the Cooper Journal, Chris continues to speak and teach in different countries of the world.
More information about the book can be found on the publisher's website.
Table of contents
Excerpt
For Habrozhiteley 25% coupon discount - Interface
Alan Cooper began work on the first edition of this book 20 years ago. He urged programmers that it was time to step forward to meet users and start writing programs that they would like. Nowadays, a completely different situation has arisen - the digitization of all types of information has forced users to plunge into new technologies. The fourth edition of the book takes into account all the changes in the industry over the past seven years, while preserving all the ideas from previous editions that have not lost their relevance.Interaction design is a human-centered approach for designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services. Much attention is paid to the design of behavior - an aspect that traditional design disciplines are often neglected.
This book focuses on the goal-oriented approach, in which the focus of designers focuses on the goals of users (that is, on the reasons for which they use this product), on their expectations, worldview and inclinations. That it allows you to create powerful solutions that are pleasant to work with.
Preface to the fourth edition
This book is dedicated to interaction design — the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services. Like most design disciplines, interaction design is primarily focused on form. Nonetheless, first and foremost, interaction design focuses on an aspect that is rarely paid attention to in traditional design disciplines: behavior design.
')
As a rule, design influences human behavior: architecture is focused on the use of physical space by people, and graphic design often tries to stimulate a certain reaction. But now, with the ubiquitous spread of high-tech products - from computers to cars, from phones to home appliances - the products being created are increasingly showing complex behavior.
Take at least such a simple product as a stove. Before the digital age, it was easy to manage it: it was enough to turn one knob to the desired position. The handle was marked on the handle to select the mode: one for shutdown and several tags for specific temperatures. Every time the handle turned in a certain position, the same thing always happened. Of course, it is possible to call this “behavior”, but of course, this is a very simple behavior.
Compare with modern plates equipped with microprocessors, LCD indicators and embedded operating systems. On the control panel are buttons with inscriptions that are not related to cooking: “Start”, “Cancel”, “Program”, as well as (probably more expected) buttons “Baking” and “Grill”. What happens when you press one of these buttons is much harder to predict than when you turn the knob on an old gas stove. Moreover, the result of pressing one of these buttons often depends on the mode of operation of the plate, as well as on which buttons were pressed before. This is what is meant by "complex behavior."
The emergence of products with complex behavior has generated a new discipline. Interaction design adopts theory and techniques from traditional design, usability and engineering disciplines. However, the result is more than the sum of the parts; He has his own unique methods and techniques. And it is worth noting that the design of the interaction belongs to the field of design, markedly different from the scientific and engineering disciplines of activity. Although the analytical method is used in the design of interaction where it is necessary, the synthesis and the desire to predict the future state of affairs (not limited to the current state) play an equally important role in it.
Interaction design is essentially human-centered. To the greatest extent, it seeks to meet the needs and wishes of people interacting with a product or service. These goals and needs are most clearly expressed as narrations - logical and emotional sequences of events. In response to these user stories, digital products must present their behavioral narratives, ensuring proper response, not only at the level of logic, data entry and presentation, but also at a more human level.
This book discusses the specific approach to interaction, which we call the goal-oriented approach. It was found that when designers focus on the goals of users (that is, on the reasons for which they use this product), on their expectations, world view and inclinations, they manage to create powerful solutions that are pleasant to work with.
Even a casual observer of technology development will notice that interactive products are quickly becoming more complex. If a mechanical device can have a dozen visible states, then a digital product can support thousands of states (or even more!). This complexity can turn into a nightmare for both users and developers. To prevent complexity from getting out of control, it is necessary to act systematically and rationally. This does not mean that creativity and ingenuity are not encouraged - on the contrary, it turned out that systematicity helps to more clearly identify opportunities for the application of revolutionary thinking and helps to evaluate the effectiveness of ideas.
According to Gestalt theory, people perceive objects not as a combination of individual features and attributes, but as a single entity in relation to its environment. As a result, an interactive product cannot be effectively designed by expanding it into a list of atomic requirements and proposing a solution for each item. Even a relatively simple product must be considered in its entirety and in the light of its context in the world. And again it turns out that a systematic approach contributes to the formation of a holistic perception, which is necessary to create products that are useful and exciting in the opinion of their users.
What is and what is not in this book
In this book, we have tried to provide the reader with effective and practical tools for designing interaction. This toolkit consists of principles, patterns, and processes. Design principles cover general ideas about design practice, as well as rules and recommendations on how best to use specific user interface idioms and interaction design. Design patterns describe sets of interaction design idioms that are often used to resolve specific user requirements and requests. Design processes describe how to understand and define user requirements, how to translate them into the structural basis of a project, and finally, how best to apply design principles and patterns in a particular context.
Literature on the principles and patterns of design exists, but the design processes are mentioned in books rarely, and even less often the interaction of all three tools to obtain effective results is considered. We have tried to write a book in which all three components are brought together. This book will teach you how to create more efficient and useful dialog boxes and menus, but it will also help you understand how users perceive your digital product and interact with it. She also explains how to use this information during the design process.
Integration of principles, processes and design patterns plays a key role in designing effective interaction with the product and the interface. “Objectively good” user interfaces do not exist. The quality depends on the context: who the user of your product is, what it does, what motives it guides. The use of a single set of “for all occasions” principles simplifies the creation of a user interface, but does not always lead to a better end result. Anyone who wants to create good solutions will inevitably have to work hard to truly understand the people who will interact with the product. Only in this case, the tools of principles and patterns used in specific situations will bring real benefits. We hope this book will push you to better understand the needs of the users of your product, and teach you how to transform this understanding into a better product.
This book does not attempt to provide some kind of style guide or set of standards for building an interface. Moreover, in Chapter 17, you will learn about the limited capabilities of such tools. However, we hope that the processes and principles described in the book will be well combined with the style guide that you have chosen for yourself. Style guides help find the answer to the “what?” Question, but usually do poorly with the answer to the “why?” Question. Our book tries to answer these questions.
The book covers four main steps in designing interactive systems: studying the subject area, analyzing users and their requirements, determining the structural basis of the solution, and working out the details. Many practitioners add the fifth step to these four steps: verification, that is, testing the effectiveness of the solution on users. This is part of the discipline commonly known as usability.
Verification is an important and worthy component of many interaction design initiatives, but it is a fairly independent discipline and practice. Testing and usability testing are briefly discussed in Chapter 5. We also recommend that you refer to a sufficiently significant and continuously growing volume of usability literature for more detailed information on how to conduct and analyze usability tests.
Book structure
The main ideas of the book are summarized in a simple and convenient structure. The book is divided into three parts:
Part I provides a detailed description of the process of goal-oriented design, and also discusses the issues of building design teams and integrating with project implementation teams.
Part II deals with high-level principles that can be applied to any interaction design task on virtually any platform.
Part III deals with low-level and platform-specific idioms and interface design principles for mobile devices, desktops, web services, etc.
Changes in the fourth edition
In June 2007, just two months after the release of the third edition of the book, Apple once and for all changed the field of digital technology by launching iPhone and iOS. In 2010, the first commercially successful tablet computer, the iPad, was released. These devices, equipped with a touch screen and sensors, and the competing products that followed, complemented the language of interaction with a completely new lexicon of idioms and design patterns. The fourth edition of the book discusses these and other interaction idioms.
The new edition has preserved what remained true; updated what has changed; and a new material has appeared reflecting changes in the industry over the past seven years. The book also discusses new concepts that we developed in practice, taking into account the era of change.
The following is a brief summary of the major changes in this edition:
- The material was reorganized and systematized so that the structure and the sequence of presentation became more compact and convenient. Some chapters were rearranged, others merged, some were reduced, and several new chapters also appeared.
- Terminology and examples have been updated to reflect the current state of the industry. The entire text was carefully crafted to make the book more readable and better read.
- In Part I, the process of goal-oriented design is described in more detail and more accurately reflects the most modern practice in Cooper. Also included is additional information on building a design team and integrating with the development team and the project team.
- Part II has undergone significant processing for a more clear presentation of the basic concepts and principles. Also added updated material on the integration of visual design.
- Part III was overhauled, updated and expanded in accordance with the specifics of new mobile and touch platforms and interaction idioms, with a more detailed description of web interaction and interaction with other types of devices and systems.
We hope that with these additions and changes the book will become an even more useful and relevant source of information than previous editions.
Who is this book written for?
Although the subject of discussion is mainly focused on students and practitioners in the field of interaction design, the book is of interest to anyone interested in user interaction with digital technologies. Developers and designers of all kinds involved in the design of digital products, usability professionals, project managers - all of them will find something useful in the book. Readers of previous editions of "About the Interface" or the book "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum" (published by Sams, 2004) will find here new and updated information about the methods and principles of design.
We hope the book turned out to be informative and interesting. But above all, we hope that it will force you to take a fresh look at the process of designing digital products. The practice of interaction design is constantly evolving, and now it is new enough and diverse enough to generate quite diverse opinions on the topic. If you have an interesting opinion or just want to talk, we will be happy to receive a message from you. You can contact us at alan@cooper.com, rmreimann@gmail.com, davcron@gmail.com or chrisnoessel@gmail.com.
About the authors
Alan Cooper has been one of the innovators in the software world for over 40 years. His ideas and today continue to influence the new generation of developers, entrepreneurs and professionals in the field of user interaction.
Alan opened his first company in 1976 and created a product that was called "the first serious commercial program for microcomputers." In 1988, he invented a dynamically expanding visual programming environment and sold it to Bill Gates, who released it under the name Visual Basic. For this achievement, Alan was called "the father of Visual Basic."
In 1992, Alan and his wife Sue jointly founded the first consulting firm Cooper, which worked in the field of interaction design. By 1997, Cooper had developed basic design methods, which are now generally accepted. The concept of characters that Alan invented and then popularized in his two best-selling books, “About Face” and “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum”, is almost universally applied by experts in the field of user interaction.
Today, Alan continues to advocate for the humanization of technology from his farm in the hilly terrain north of San Francisco.
Robert Reiman spent more than 20 years developing digital capabilities as a designer, writer, strategist, and consultant. He led dozens of desktop, mobile, network, and embedded projects in the consumer, commercial, scientific, and professional sectors for both start-ups and giants on the Fortune 500 list.
Robert, one of the first designers at Cooper, led the development and improvement of many goal-oriented design methods described in the book. In 2005, he became the founding president of the IxDA Association for Interaction Design (www.ixda.org). He also led the user interaction groups at Cooper, Bose, frog and Sonos, and currently works as the lead interaction designer for the PatientsLikeMe network.
David Cronin works as the head of the engineering service at GE and is part of the design and customer management team at GE. Prior to that, he was director of interaction design at Smart Design Studios in San Francisco and was the first director of interaction design at Cooper.
David has been involved in product design for surgeons, museum visitors, financial brokers, nurses, drivers, dentists, financial analysts, radiologists, maintenance engineers, production planners, marketers, video operators and people with chronic illnesses. While working at Cooper, he made a notable contribution to the development of principles, patterns and practical techniques of goal-oriented design.
Christopher Nossel develops products, services and strategies in the consumer and financial sectors, as well as in the health sector, holding the position of Lead Specialist at Cooper. He participated in the long-term planning of measures to combat terrorism, built prototypes of new technologies for Microsoft, and also worked in the direction of telemedicine.
Prior to joining Cooper, Chris founded a small interaction design agency, where he was involved in the development of exhibitions and museum exhibits. He was also the director of information technology at marchFIRST, where he participated in the creation of the Innovation Center for Interaction Design. In 2012, Chris became one of the co-authors of Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction. His work is regularly published in the Cooper Journal, Chris continues to speak and teach in different countries of the world.
More information about the book can be found on the publisher's website.
Table of contents
Excerpt
For Habrozhiteley 25% coupon discount - Interface
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