Recommended Reading

• Arlov, Laura. GUI Design for Dummies. Foster City, CA: IDG Books Worldwide, 1997.

Chapter 11, "Making Your GUI Easy to Understand," discusses how to make interfaces easy to use by providing feedback and affordance.

• Armstrong, Strohm, "Previewing the Common Controls DLL for Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0, Part II." Microsoft Systems Journal, November 1996.

Discusses the new ListView control, including the LVS_EX_CHECKBOXES style.

• Cooper, Alan. About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design. Foster City, CA: IDG Books Worldwide, Inc., 1995.

Chapter 5, "Idioms and Affordances," discusses affordance, particularly with respect to our instinctive understanding of how to use things with our hands. It also discusses what it means for an interface to be intuitive. Chapter 12, "Posture and State," has a good comparison of the taskbar and the Alt+Tab command. Chapter 15, "Elephants, Mice, and Minnies," has a good discussion about cursor hinting.

• Horton, William. The Icon Book: Visual Symbols for Computer Systems and Documentation. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1994.

The ultimate resource for icon design information. Confusing icons are definitely not visible.

• Howlett, Virginia. Visual Interface Design for Windows. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1996.

Chapter 8, "Affordance, Realism, and Dimension," discusses affordance, realism vs. abstraction, and the use of 3-D as an affordance. It also discusses the effectiveness of icons at conveying their meaning. Unfortunately, that effectiveness isn't great, so graphics and text together (for example, tooltips or text captions) are often the best solution.

• Microsoft Corporation. Designing for the User Experience. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 1999.

See the chapter on general interaction techniques for guidelines on how to give feedback for selection, editing, and direct manipulation. See the chapter on special design considerations for the advantages and disadvantages of using sound for feedback.

• Norman, Donald A. The Design of Everyday Things. New York, NY: Currency/Doubleday, 1990.

Discusses how users learn to use everyday things through their design attributes of visibility, affordance, natural mappings, constraints, conceptual models, and feedback. Norman helped popularize the concept of affordance and defined it as "the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used."

• Tognazzini, Bruce. Tog on Interface. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1992.

The first words in the Introduction are "The Visible Interface." The introduction makes the distinction between a visible user interface and a graphical user interface. Appendix B, "Index of Principles and Guidelines," presents guidelines that make an interface visible. An interesting list, but not the most practical advice for Windows programmers.