Designing Interfaces - Brossura

Tidwell, Jenifer

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0596008031 ISBN 13: 9780596008031

Casa editrice: O'Reilly, 2005

Riassunto

Designing a good interface isn't easy. Users demand software that is well-behaved, good-looking, and easy to use. Your clients or managers demand originality and a short time to market. Your UI technology -- web applications, desktop software, even mobile devices -- may give you the tools you need, but little guidance on how to use them well.

UI designers over the years have refined the art of interface design, evolving many best practices and reusable ideas. If you learn these, and understand why the best user interfaces work so well, you too can design engaging and usable interfaces with less guesswork and more confidence.

Designing Interfaces captures those best practices as design patterns -- solutions to common design problems, tailored to the situation at hand. Each pattern contains practical advice that you can put to use immediately, plus a variety of examples illustrated in full color. You'll get recommendations, design alternatives, and warningson when not to use them.

Each chapter's introduction describes key design concepts that are often misunderstood, such as affordances, visual hierarchy, navigational distance, and the use of color. These give you a deeper understanding of why the patterns work, and how to apply them with more insight.

A book can't design an interface for you -- no foolproof design process is given here -- but Designing Interfaces does give you concrete ideas that you can mix and recombine as you see fit. Experienced designers can use it as a sourcebook of ideas. Novice designers will find a roadmap to the world of interface and interaction design, with enough guidance to start using these patterns immediately.

Su questo libro

L'autore

For more than a decade, Jenifer Tidwell has been designing and building user interfaces for a variety of industry verticals, often in the Java programming language. She has experience in designing both desktop and Web applications. As a user interface designer at The MathWorks, Jenifer was instrumental in a redesign of the charting and visualization UI of MATLAB, which is used by researchers, students, and engineers worldwide to develop cars, planes, proteins, and theories about the universe.

Contenuti

Preface; SMALL INTERFACE PIECES, LOOSELY JOINED; ABOUT PATTERNS IN GENERAL; OTHER PATTERN COLLECTIONS; ABOUT THE PATTERNS IN THIS BOOK; AUDIENCE; HOW THIS BOOK IS ORGANIZED; COMMENTS AND QUESTIONS; ACKNOWLEDGMENTS; Chapter 1: What Users Do; 1.1 A MEANS TO AN END; 1.2 THE BASICS OF USER RESEARCH; 1.3 USERS' MOTIVATION TO LEARN; 1.4 THE PATTERNS; Chapter 2: Organizing the Content:Information Architecture and Application Structure; 2.1 THE BASICS OF INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE: DIVIDING STUFF UP; 2.2 PHYSICAL STRUCTURE; 2.3 THE PATTERNS; Chapter 3: Getting Around:Navigation, Signposts, and Wayfinding; 3.1 STAYING FOUND; 3.2 THE COST OF NAVIGATION; 3.3 THE PATTERNS; Chapter 4: Organizing the Page:Layout of Page Elements; 4.1 THE BASICS OF PAGE LAYOUT; 4.2 THE PATTERNS; Chapter 5: Doing Things:Actions and Commands; 5.1 PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES; 5.2 THE PATTERNS; Chapter 6: Showing Complex Data:Trees, Tables, and Other Information Graphics; 6.1 THE BASICS OF INFORMATION GRAPHICS; 6.2 THE PATTERNS; Chapter 7: Getting Input from Users:Forms and Controls; 7.1 THE BASICS OF FORM DESIGN; 7.2 CONTROL CHOICE; 7.3 THE PATTERNS; Chapter 8: Builders and Editors; 8.1 THE BASICS OF EDITOR DESIGN; 8.2 THE PATTERNS; Chapter 9: Making It Look Good:Visual Style and Aesthetics; 9.1 SAME CONTENT, DIFFERENT STYLES; 9.2 THE BASICS OF VISUAL DESIGN; 9.3 WHAT THIS MEANS FOR DESKTOP APPLICATIONS; 9.4 THE PATTERNS; Colophon;

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: O'Reilly
• Data di pubblicazione: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0596008031
• ISBN 13: 9780596008031
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 332