Preface


Once upon a time, interface designers worked with a woefully small toolbox.

We had a handful of simple controls: text fields, buttons, menus, tiny icons, and modal dialogs. We carefully put them together according to the Windows Style Guide or the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, and we hoped that users would understand the resulting interfaceand too often, they didn't. We designed for small screens, few colors, slow CPUs, and slow networks (if the user was connected at all). We made them gray.

Things have changed. If you design interfaces today, you work with a much bigger palette of components and ideas. You have a choice of many more user interface toolkits than before, such as Java™ Swing, Qt, HTML and Javascript, Flash, and numerous open-source options. Apple's and Microsoft's native UI toolkits are richer and nicer-looking than they used to be. Display technology is better. Web applications often look as professionally designed as the web sites they're embedded in, and while desktop-UI ideas like drag-and-drop are integrated into web applications slowly, some of those web sensibilities are migrating back into desktop applications in the form of blue underlined links, Back/Next buttons, daring fonts and background images, and nice, non-gray color schemes.

But it's still not easy to design good interfaces. Let's say you're not a trained or self-taught interface designer. If you just use the UI toolkits the way they should be used, and if you follow the various style guides or imitate existing applications, you can probably create a mediocre but passable interface.

Alas, that may not be enough anymore. Users' expectations are higher than they used to beif your interface isn't easy to use "out of the box," users will not think well of it. Even if the interface obeys all the standards, you may have misunderstood users' preferred workflow, used the wrong vocabulary, or made it too hard to figure out what the software even does. Impatient users often won't give you the benefit of the doubt. Worse, if you've built an unusable web site or web application, frustrated users can give up and switch to your competitor with just the click of a button. So the cost of building a mediocre interface is higher than it used to be, too.

It's even tougher if you design products outside of the desktop and web worlds, because there's very little good design advice out there. Palmtops, cell phones, car navigation systems, digital TV recordersdesigners are still figuring out what works and what doesn't, often from basic principles. (And their users often tolerate difficult interfacesbut that won't last long.)

Devices like phones, TVs, and car dashboards once were the exclusive domain of industrial designers. But now those devices have become smart. Increasingly powerful computers drive them, and software-based features and applications are multiplying in response to market demands. They're here to stay, whether or not they are easy to use. At this rate, good interface and interaction design may be the only hope for our collective sanity in 10 years.




Designing Interfaces
Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design
ISBN: 0596008031
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 75

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