Jenifer Tidwell
Author of Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design
About the Author
Jenifer Tidwell is an interaction designer and software developer for The MathWorks, makers of technical computing software near Boston, Massachusetts
Works by Jenifer Tidwell
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Gender
- female
- Occupations
- Interaction Designer and Software Developer
- Short biography
- 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. In 2007 E-consultancy.com reported that O’Reilly author Jenifer Tidwell is one of their “top ten user experience gurus."
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/2312...
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Reviews
This is a UI design version of the OOP design patterns book by Erich Gamma, et al. The book is beautifully laid out and contains a ton of detailed screen shots (as a book about visual ui design should be). Like Erich's book, this one can be read as a reference book that talks about the "what", "use when", "why" and "how" of each design pattern.
Although seemingly complete with over 94 "patterns", I felt this is a bit overwhelming. While most patterns are commonly known UI controls/constructs show more (e.g. breadcrumb, property sheet, tree table), features (e.g. multi-level undo, skins, preview) and concepts (responsive disclosure, good defaults), there are other minor/obvious items that I felt should not be called "patterns" (e.g. escape hatch, liquid layout).
The goal of a good "patterns" book should be to discuss as few patterns as possible that covers the vast majority 80-90% of the problem space. Erich's book had about two dozen patterns which well covers the world of the object-oriented programming. This book, 94! Some "patterns" dubiously overlap each other not just by a little: escape hatch, cancel-ability, forgiveness, undo... They are all the same thing to me.
I felt this book would have been so much better if the author could have taken more time to distill the "patterns" down to fewer core ones and talk about each a little more in depth. Alternatively, just talk about purely visual controls and leave feature/concepts out of the picture. "Completeness" is not always a good thing. show less
Although seemingly complete with over 94 "patterns", I felt this is a bit overwhelming. While most patterns are commonly known UI controls/constructs show more (e.g. breadcrumb, property sheet, tree table), features (e.g. multi-level undo, skins, preview) and concepts (responsive disclosure, good defaults), there are other minor/obvious items that I felt should not be called "patterns" (e.g. escape hatch, liquid layout).
The goal of a good "patterns" book should be to discuss as few patterns as possible that covers the vast majority 80-90% of the problem space. Erich's book had about two dozen patterns which well covers the world of the object-oriented programming. This book, 94! Some "patterns" dubiously overlap each other not just by a little: escape hatch, cancel-ability, forgiveness, undo... They are all the same thing to me.
I felt this book would have been so much better if the author could have taken more time to distill the "patterns" down to fewer core ones and talk about each a little more in depth. Alternatively, just talk about purely visual controls and leave feature/concepts out of the picture. "Completeness" is not always a good thing. show less
Has helpful tips. A few technical quibbles. Sometimes examples were given of an interactive process with only one screenshot, making it a bit of work to try to figure out what the rest of the interaction looked like. I occassionly had a hard time flipping through looking for a particular pattern.
Really though a good book as far as interface design goes. Certainly one of the better O'Reilly books I've read in a while.
(Lots of good examples for folks to build off of and good references. One show more of those books I'm tempted to actually purchase for myself instead of just borrowing it from the library ;) ). show less
Really though a good book as far as interface design goes. Certainly one of the better O'Reilly books I've read in a while.
(Lots of good examples for folks to build off of and good references. One show more of those books I'm tempted to actually purchase for myself instead of just borrowing it from the library ;) ). show less
Totally awesome book on user interface design.
Easy to absorb information, presented in beautiful way.
What I liked about the book is that it does not cover the very basic stuff that is usually obvious, but dives deeply into the principles of good UI design.
Easy to absorb information, presented in beautiful way.
What I liked about the book is that it does not cover the very basic stuff that is usually obvious, but dives deeply into the principles of good UI design.
This is a good book to start with while learning designing interfaces. I wish there could be more examples of modern web/ software interfaces.
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- Works
- 4
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- Rating
- 3.8
- Reviews
- 7
- ISBNs
- 19
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- 3