Introduction to the Second Edition

This book is intended to provide you with effective and practical tools for designing user interfaces. These tools come in two distinct varieties: tactical and strategic. Tactical tools are hints and tips about using and creating user interface idioms, like dialog boxes and pushbuttons. Strategic tools are ways to think about user interface idioms—in other words, the ways in which the user and the idiom interact.

Although books are available that deal with either strategic or tactical principles, our goal has been to create a book that weaves the two together. While helping you design more attractive and effective dialog boxes, this book will simultaneously help you understand how the user comprehends and interacts with your software.

Integrating the strategic and tactical approaches is the key to designing effective user interactions and interfaces. For example, there is no such thing as an objectively good dialog box—the quality depends on the situation: who the user is and what his background and goals are. Merely applying a set of tactical dictums makes user interface creation easier, but it doesn't make the end result better . Deep thoughts about how users should interact with your system won't improve the software, either. What does work is maintaining a strategic sensitivity for how users actually interact with specific software and having at your command a tactical toolbox to apply in any particular situation. This book both deepens your understanding of users and teaches you how to translate that understanding into design concepts.

Who Should Read This Book

When About Face was first published in August 1995, the landscape of interface design was a frontier wilderness. A small cadre of people brave enough to hold the title User Interface Designer operated under the shadow of software engineering, rather like the tiny, quick-witted mammals that scrambled under the shadows of hulking tyrannosaurs. Software design, as the first edition of About Face referred to it, was ill understood and ill appreciated; and, when it was practiced at all, programmers usually practiced it. A handful of uneasy documenters, trainers , and technical support people, along with a rising number of people from another nascent field—usability practitioners —realized that something needed to change.

The amazing growth and popularity of the Web drove that change, seemingly overnight. Suddenly, ease of use was a term on everyone's lips. Traditional design professionals, who had dabbled in digital product design during the short-lived popularity of multimedia in the early nineties, leapt to the Web en masse. Seemingly new design titles sprung up like weeds: information designer, information architect, user experience strategist, and interaction designer. For the first time ever, C-level corporate positions existed whose sole focus was creating user-centered products: the Chief Experience Officer. Major universities scrambled to offer programs to train designers in these disciplines. Meanwhile, usability and human factors practitioners have also risen in stature and are now recognized leaders in the push for better-designed products.

Although the Web knocked interface technology back by more than a decade , it inarguably placed user requirements on the radar of the corporate world for good. The aftermath of the dotcom bust aside, the authors firmly believe that visibility and concern about users and their needs will only become more pronounced in the future. People are tired of new technology. Consumers are sending a clear message that what they want is good technology: technology they can easily use to meet their needs.

Thus, the authors are happy to say, the audience for this new edition has greatly expanded: Anyone concerned about users interacting with digital technology will gain insights from reading this book. Programmers, designers of all stripes involved with digital product design, usability professionals, and project managers will all find something useful in this volume. People who have read the first edition of About Face or The Inmates Are Running The Asylum will find new and more detailed information about design methods and principles here.

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