Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design

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 (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, show more 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 of those books I'm tempted to actually purchase for myself instead of just borrowing it from the library ;) ).

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.

This book gives a broad tour of various interface elements and principles of interaction design. Discussions cover both software graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and web interfaces. Among other things, Tidwell covers many mechanisms in detail using patterns, which are a way of representing a prototypical solution to commonly encountered design problems. This book contains hands-on information and is well-suited for practitioners.

Great reference that collects common interface patterns for different types of interface issues.

Fall 2011 text book.