Designing with the Mind in Mind
1st Edition
Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Rules
Description
Early user interface (UI) practitioners were trained in cognitive psychology, from which UI design rules were based. But as the field evolves, designers enter the field from many disciplines. Practitioners today have enough experience in UI design that they have been exposed to design rules, but it is essential that they understand the psychology behind the rules in order to effectively apply them. In Designing with the Mind in Mind, Jeff Johnson, author of the best selling GUI Bloopers, provides designers with just enough background in perceptual and cognitive psychology that UI design guidelines make intuitive sense rather than being just a list of rules to follow.
Key Features
- The first practical, all-in-one source for practitioners on user interface design rules and why, when and how to apply them.
- Provides just enough background into the reasoning behind interface design rules that practitioners can make informed decisions in every project.
- Gives practitioners the insight they need to make educated design decisions when confronted with tradeoffs, including competing design rules, time constrictions, or limited resources.
Readership
Interface designers and developers, software designers, web designers, web application designers, interaction designers, appliance designers and developers, information architects, usability engineers, usability evaluators and development managers, students and teachers in computer science, graphic design, HCI, and usability.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1 We Perceive What We Expect
Chapter 2 Our Vision is Optimized to See Structure
Chapter 3 We Seek and Use Visual Structure
Chapter 4 Reading is Unnatural
Chapter 5 Our Color Vision is Limited
Chapter 6 Our Peripheral Vision is Poor
Chapter 7 Our Attention is Limited; Our Memory is Imperfect
Chapter 8 Limits on Attention, Shape, Thought and Action
Chapter 9 Recognition are Easy; Recall is Hard
Chapter 10 Learning from Experience and Performing Learned Actions are Easy; Problem Solving and Calculation are Hard
Chapter 11 Many Factors Affect Learning
Chapter 12 We Have Time Requirements
Epilogue
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
Details
- No. of pages:
- 200
- Language:
- English
- Copyright:
- © Morgan Kaufmann 2010
- Published:
- 20th May 2010
- Imprint:
- Morgan Kaufmann
- eBook ISBN:
- 9780080963020
- Paperback ISBN:
- 9780123750303
About the Author
Jeff Johnson
Jeff Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco. He is also a principal at Wiser Usability, a consultancy focused on elder usability. After earning B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale and Stanford, he worked as a UI designer, implementer, manager, usability tester, and researcher at Cromemco, Xerox, US West, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun. He has taught at Stanford, Mills, and the University of Canterbury. He is a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy and a recipient of SIGCHI's Lifetime Achievement in Practice Award. He has authored articles on a variety of topics in HCI, as well as the books GUI Bloopers (1st and 2nd eds.), Web Bloopers, Designing with the Mind in Mind (1st and 2nd eds.), Conceptual Models: Core to Good Design (with Austin Henderson), and Designing User Interfaces for an Aging Population (with Kate Finn).
Affiliations and Expertise
President and principal consultant, at UI Wizards, Inc.
Reviews
"Take fundamental principles of psychology. Illustrate. Combine with Fundamental Principles of Design. Stir gently until fully blended. Read daily until finished. Caution: The mixture is addictive"--Don Norman, Nielsen Norman group, Author of Design of Future Things.
"This book is a primer to understand the why of the larger human action principles at work—a sort of cognitive science for designers in a hurry. Above all, this is a book of profound insight into the human mind for practical people who want to get something done."-- Stuart Card, Senior Research Fellow and the manager of the User Interface Research group at the Palo Alto Research Centerfrom the foreword
"If you want to know why design rules work, Jeff Johnson provides fresh insight into the psychological rationale for user-interface design rules that pervade discussions in the world of software product and service development."--Aaron Marcus, President, Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc.
"As anyone who has taken a course in human-computer interaction (HCI) will attest, cognitive science textbooks tend towards the drier end of the literary spectrum. The achievement of this book in making the material easily accessible is therefore nothing short of magnificent. It discusses the relevant scientific findings without any lack of scholarship, but always with an eye to how those findings can be put to practical use."--BCS, British Computer Society Online, November 2010
"Rather than simply presenting another list of rules, it discusses the cognitive psychology research findings which underpin the principles identified previously by the author and others. In other words, this is a book about people, and what we know about them as users of interactive systems."--BCS, The British Computer Society Online
"Anyone who designs or implements software user interfaces will benefit greatly from this book. Whether you create desktop software, websites, or mobile apps, this book will improve the quality of your work. Johnson makes the psychology and physiology understandable and seamlessly combines it with software engineering… Designing with the Mind in Mind is informative, fascinating, easy to read, and, most importantly, highly practical."-- ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering