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About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
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| List Price: | $45.00 |
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Product Description
This completely updated volume presents the effective and practical tools you need to design great desktop applications, Web 2.0 sites, and mobile devices. You’ll learn the principles of good product behavior and gain an understanding of Cooper’s Goal-Directed Design method, which involves everything from conducting user research to defining your product using personas and scenarios. Ultimately, you’ll acquire the knowledge to design the best possible digital products and services.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #4640 in Books
- Published on: 2007-05-07
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 648 pages
Editorial Reviews
From the Back Cover
When the first edition of About Face was published in 1995, the idea of designing products based on human goals was a revolutionary concept. Thanks to the work of Alan Cooper and other pioneers, interaction design is now widely recognized as a unique and vital discipline, but our work is far from finished.
This completely updated volume presents the effective and practical tools you need to design great desktop applications, Web 2.0 sites, and mobile devices. This book will teach you the principles of good product behavior and introduce you to Cooper's Goal-Directed Design method, from conducting user research to defining your product using personas and scenarios. In short, About Face 3 will show you how to design the best possible digital products and services.
About the Author
For over 30 years Alan Cooper has been a pioneer of the modern computing era. His groundbreaking work in software design and construction has influenced a generation of programmers and business people—and helped a generation of users. He is best known as the "Father of Visual Basic," inventor of personas, and founder of Cooper, the leading design consultancy.
As Director of Design R&D at Cooper, Robert Reimann led dozens of design projects and helped develop many of the methods described in About Face 3. Currently, he is Manager of User Experience at Bose Corporation and President of IxDA, the Interaction Design Association.
David Cronin is Director of Interaction Design at Cooper, where he's led the design of products for such diverse users as surgeons, museum visitors, online shoppers, automobile drivers, financial analysts, and the elderly.
Customer Reviews
If it was all obvious, there wouldn't be a book about it!
Scoring in the game of interaction design is very simple. You get 0 points for discovering the obvious and making it easy for the user and -10,000 points for missing it.
This book should be the bible for companies trying to turn their software products around.
Nearly a complete course in the "Cooper Method"
I read (and still have) the previous two editions of this book. Unlike the usual "complete revised and updated" hype for new editions, this one has had some serious re-work and expansion.
The whole structure of the book is new and very close to being a complete course/textbook in the Cooper approach to Goal-based Design. All the sections have been expanded based upon reactions to the previous version(s) as well as their collective experience. The most obvious changes are towards describing in greater detail the process and how to integrate it into the large design/development cycle.
For those who have not read (about) Cooper (and his firm's) work, this book is the complete approach in detail. It is written for professional UI designer and developers and makes some assumptions about the background of the reader.
Executives, stakeholders or those needing a more general overview should pick up his other book "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" which was written for that audience. That book includes more business cases and rationale without the heavy details.
As a UI professional for over 20 years find his approach to be the most useful in creating truly useful and usable applications. This book continues to point out how get beyond mere incremental design enhancements to truly revolutionary and winning designs.
Trite and tedious
At every chapter in this book I thought, "Well this book's been worthless so far, but I think it gets better in the next chapter." I thought that until the last (26th) chapter, which was actually half-decent. I've never been so disappointed in a book. Any designer with the slightest bit of experience will learn nothing from this book. Nearly every piece of advice is trite ("Design principle: Use noneditable controls for output-only text"). There's very little depth or thinking beyond the completely obvious. You will learn more from any other book (on any topic) than from this book. If you've already bought it, you should skip to the chapters with non-zero value. I recommend chapter 5 (personas), chapter 16 (undo), chapter 17 (save), and chapter 26 (misc). The section on perpetual intermediates is good too.
I finished the book 10 minutes ago after a very tedious three months. I can finally put it on the shelf and never look at it again.
