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About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design By Alan CooperRobert ReimannDavid Cronin ( Wiley )
Release Date: 2007-05-07
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List Price: $45.00
Price: $29.70
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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.
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 A Waste of Time ( blksabb3 )
The first thing you will notice about this book is that the author is extremely wordy. There is a constant repeat rephrasing of the same information. For instance, you will read that software developers usually don't know what they're doing nine-hundred times in the first chapter(and if the drivel in this book is the best advice a developer receives then it's no wonder). It begins to seem like an endless boring lecture where the speaker is droning on and on without really saying anything. I had read the first seventy pages before realising that I hadn't learned a single thing. He seems more interested in coining terms than conveying any actual information.
The only good thing I can say about my experience with this book is that while scanning through it seemed to have tidbits of useful information in between the mountains of filler. If I was looking for a good book on the subject I would skip this one and pick up one that gets more to the point.
It horrifies me to think that the author had already written another book on the same subject and then decided that he still had more to say.
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 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.
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Nearly a complete course in the "Cooper Method" ( nlfan )
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.
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Trite and tedious ( lawrencekesteloot )
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.
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Essential Reading
If you only get one book on interaction design, this is the one.
I picked up the second edition when I was just starting out as an interaction designer; it was a great primer and filled in a lot of the missing pieces for me. Now that I've been at it a while, it's still the book I go to whenever I have a question. I found the book reads well cover to cover, and also serves well as a handbook. The info you need on a topic is usually well contained in a section.
Not only does this book cover the general principles and theory behind interaction design, but also provides lots of real-world practical information. The writers call on designers not simply to follow rigid interaction design rules, but to create elegant, informative and respectful interfaces. That's a loftier goal, and this book give you the tools to attain it. The updated edition also spans new technologies and paradigms that have emerged, and covers them thoroughly.
Cooper has an unrivaled depth of experience to draw on, creating a truly comprehensive book.
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