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Book Review: Designing With the Mind In Mind
benrothke (2577567) writes "Neurologists and brain scientists are in agreement that in truth, we know very little about how the brain works. With that, in the just released second edition of Designing with the Mind in Mind, a Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Guidelines, author Jeff Johnson provides a fascinating introduction on the fundamentals of perceptual and cognitive psychology for effective user interface (UI) design and creation." Keep reading for the rest of Ben's review.
Designing with the Mind in Mind, a Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Guidelines
author
Jeff Johnson
pages
240
publisher
Morgan Kaufmann
rating
9/10
reviewer
Ben Rothke
ISBN
978-0124079144
summary
Excellent reference on the integration of user interface design and the mind
Johnson heads up a consulting firm that specialized in evaluating and designing UI and brings significant experience to every chapter. He writes that following user-interface design guidelines is not as straightforward as something like following a cooking recipe; even though people often compare the two. Design rules often describe goals rather than actions, as they are purposefully very general to make them broadly applicable. The downside to that is that it means that their exact meaning and applicability to specific design situations is open to interpretation.
With that, the book provides an exceptional foundation on how to ensure effective usability is successfully implemented. The book spends a long time detailing how users make decisions and choices.
What's really good about the book is that Johnson provides ample details about the topic, but doesn't reduce it to so just a set of rules or mind-numbing (and thusly unreadable) checklists. His synopsis of the topics provides the reader with a broad understanding of the topic and what they need to do in order to ensure effective UI design is executed.
While the focus in the book is heaving on general and cognitive psychology, the book is written for the reader who is a novice in the area, and stays quite practical, without getting in the vague theoretical areas.
The book provides scores of examples of how people relate to an interface, and how to design accordingly. One of many fascinating examples is when the author details the notion of attentional blink. After we see or hear something, either in real-life or on a monitor, for a very brief amount of time following the recognition, between .15 and .45 of a second; we are nearly deaf and blind to other visual stimuli, even though our eyes and ears stay functional. Researchers call this attentional blink and it is thought to be caused by the brain's perceptual and attentional mechanism being briefly fully occupied with processing the first recognition.
What this means for a UI designer is that attentional blink can cause the user to miss information or events if things appear in rapid succession. The book then goes on to describe techniques in which to create an effective UI to deal with the effects of attentional blink. And he does this for scores of other similar issues.
Another fascinating example is around visual hierarchy, which lets people focus on the relevant information. The book notes that one of the most important goals in arranging information presentations is to provide a visual hierarchy, an arrangement that breaks the information into distinct sections, labels each section prominently, and presents the sections and subsections as a hierarchy.
The book details the myriad areas which are crucial for an effective interface. Chapters 4 and 5 provide significant detail about the importance of color for effective visual representation.
As the title suggests, the book takes a deep approach to the neuroscience and psychology in UI design. Other chapters include topics on human vision, sound, task, cognition, memory and more.
As to memory, chapter details issues around the working memory of a user. He gives numerous examples of error boxes and help screens that work and are epic failures, and how to do it right. The classic example he provides is a 4-step Windows XP wireless error message. If the user were to follow the directions, the instructions would close after step 1.
Each chapter provides numerous implications of proper and improper design, and provides the needed recommendations. While the topics may sound dry, Johnson writes in an engaging and often humorous style.
The book clearly and empirically shows how effective UI design makes all the difference on how users interact with an application or web site. The book will certainly be an important reference to software designers, web designers, web application designers and those interested in HCI, and usability.
For the designers that can't understand why their users are frustrated, they can understand why here. For designers that really want to know what is going on in their users minds, one is hard pressed to find a better reference than this.
As the subtitle of the book is Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Guidelines, the book is an invaluable resource for those serious about effective UI design.
Reviewed by Ben Rothke.
You can purchase Designing with the Mind in Mind, a Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Guidelines from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
With that, the book provides an exceptional foundation on how to ensure effective usability is successfully implemented. The book spends a long time detailing how users make decisions and choices.
What's really good about the book is that Johnson provides ample details about the topic, but doesn't reduce it to so just a set of rules or mind-numbing (and thusly unreadable) checklists. His synopsis of the topics provides the reader with a broad understanding of the topic and what they need to do in order to ensure effective UI design is executed.
While the focus in the book is heaving on general and cognitive psychology, the book is written for the reader who is a novice in the area, and stays quite practical, without getting in the vague theoretical areas.
The book provides scores of examples of how people relate to an interface, and how to design accordingly. One of many fascinating examples is when the author details the notion of attentional blink. After we see or hear something, either in real-life or on a monitor, for a very brief amount of time following the recognition, between .15 and .45 of a second; we are nearly deaf and blind to other visual stimuli, even though our eyes and ears stay functional. Researchers call this attentional blink and it is thought to be caused by the brain's perceptual and attentional mechanism being briefly fully occupied with processing the first recognition.
What this means for a UI designer is that attentional blink can cause the user to miss information or events if things appear in rapid succession. The book then goes on to describe techniques in which to create an effective UI to deal with the effects of attentional blink. And he does this for scores of other similar issues.
Another fascinating example is around visual hierarchy, which lets people focus on the relevant information. The book notes that one of the most important goals in arranging information presentations is to provide a visual hierarchy, an arrangement that breaks the information into distinct sections, labels each section prominently, and presents the sections and subsections as a hierarchy.
The book details the myriad areas which are crucial for an effective interface. Chapters 4 and 5 provide significant detail about the importance of color for effective visual representation.
As the title suggests, the book takes a deep approach to the neuroscience and psychology in UI design. Other chapters include topics on human vision, sound, task, cognition, memory and more.
As to memory, chapter details issues around the working memory of a user. He gives numerous examples of error boxes and help screens that work and are epic failures, and how to do it right. The classic example he provides is a 4-step Windows XP wireless error message. If the user were to follow the directions, the instructions would close after step 1.
Each chapter provides numerous implications of proper and improper design, and provides the needed recommendations. While the topics may sound dry, Johnson writes in an engaging and often humorous style.
The book clearly and empirically shows how effective UI design makes all the difference on how users interact with an application or web site. The book will certainly be an important reference to software designers, web designers, web application designers and those interested in HCI, and usability.
For the designers that can't understand why their users are frustrated, they can understand why here. For designers that really want to know what is going on in their users minds, one is hard pressed to find a better reference than this.
As the subtitle of the book is Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Guidelines, the book is an invaluable resource for those serious about effective UI design.
Reviewed by Ben Rothke.
You can purchase Designing with the Mind in Mind, a Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Guidelines from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I taught about a half of a semester of an HCI course with the 1st version and loved it. The examples are fantastic, the students liked reading it (well, compared to how much students generally like things).
//TODO: Insert catchy phrase
Image search: https://www.google.com/search?... sa=X&ei=b6JeU6HtBcW62gW2gIGgBQ&ved=0CE4QsAQ&biw=1430&bih=962
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I would rather deal with a moral person with poor grammar, than an angry person like you with such vulgar language.
Every single time I've seen "user interface experts" decide how something should operate, it ends up designed for the LCD, to the exclusion of people who become experts at whatever the software is. You're only a novice for a short time, but you can be an expert for a long time.
The most productive software I've ever used has not been deisgned by user interface experts.
Bring back design by experts, for experts, and I'll be happy. Even if it's something I've never used before, I'd rather spend the time to get good at a productive interface, than an easy to use interface. Hell, even if I'll only ever use it once in my life, because in the aggregate, it's a net win when measured across all the tools I will use.
tl;dr
Also, while we're at it... Beta!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
I think that you being modded down to -1 is a bit much, but there is a problem here. What you said is potentially well and good for contexts that are purely utilitarian to the degree that anything but pure pragmatic functionality is to be viewed as an active negative, such as industrial control, power plants, etc.
But for most people's desktops, people expect both functionality *and* some degree of modern aesthetics, and there is an extremely common rejection of interfaces that look 15 years old, even if they were considered close to ideally functional and aesthetic 15 years ago.
Since that is demonstrably what the market generally wants, that is therefore the general trend over time: "flashy graphics" are sometimes overdone, but the word "flashy" is in the eye of the beholder, and most improvements to GUIs over the decades have been about modernization to meet the moving target of whatever "modern" means in each era, with actual breakthroughs in usability being far less common.
Furthermore, the people who design and implement GUIs are (with the exception of 1-person development teams) rarely the same team members who would address software vulnerabilities, so maybe that's where your -1 came from.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
::: Illiterates...
You seem to not know the definition of illiterate.
A grammar mistake or spelling mistake is NOT being illiterate.
Irony!
Someone should buy a copy for Apple, Inc., iOS division, and probably OSX division in the future.
Chapters 4 and 5 provide significant detail about the importance of color for effective visual representation.
Could the Windows and Google designers are be wrong? Is an all-white-and-very-light-grey interface not optimal? Heresy!
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.
Agreed.
Seems to me like nothing more than a few typing errors and certainly not worth such and extreme reaction. I found the article to be enjoyable and informative and it is unfortunate that you did not.
Apple has been going downhill as the result of doing things like others in industry have been doing: using profiling and statistics gathered from user's use of their software.
Instead of thinking about themselves (advanced users) and thinking about what they've learned about novices and creating compromise solutions. They are taking the easy way out and using profiling of huge numbers of users they gather simple statistics from. This then guides them too strongly in making the decisions they do. This ALSO causes a bias towards the majority of users, who are clueless and undermines any motives to add subtle things for advanced users (because it takes effort to design something for beginners and advanced users while keeping them both happy.)
Observing a user go over the menus looking for a feature lets you know that is working for them but when you have stats showing that most people rarely ever use the menus leads you to conclude you should get rid of the menu bar because people don't use it enough. Or even remove rarely used features that are still important to the users but don't show that importance with your statistics modeling.
Advanced users may block your profiling or opt out (firefox asks) so your profile is of a different demographic - not your whole user base.
Then there is the argument that people are getting more stupid; years of not having to solve any problems for themselves makes them adverse to figuring things out. Even simple stuff like building something from legos is a problem for more children today. If your software provides smart features which you can combine in various ways to get MANY things accomplished it could be that today's users are less capable of putting the steps together to perform a task! They may need wizards to hand hold them down a rigid path.... like a lot of typical consumer software does and phone apps seem to go towards (simple apps with a narrow focus... just use more apps and if you are lucky combine the results... if possible.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I am ordering the book for use in my class... any ideas on how we could use it in a course?
Perhaps the parent, you and I could devise coursework around this book? (I've not read it yet.)
As far as those other two books, I recommend them in the class for those who are interested. I've considered assigning Everyday Things... I have little trouble extracting the homework time they are supposed to be using for a 4 credit course... probably because it's required and I'm the only person who teaches it (and I make sure they know this.) So, I can force them to actually work and I will flunk them all if need be; without any regret or harming myself (now if I did that routinely, I'd lose the job... but you only need to establish the reputation and keep the rumors going.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
For someone who drives on the wrong side of the road and eats Marmite....shuddup!
The problem with using color, of course, is that a certain group of people are color blind.
I'm reminded of an old friend of mine who is red/green color blind.
My grandfather is Red Green Colorblind. If he survives another 12 years or so 3D printed organs may sustain his life long enough for him to get digital cameras as occular implants, and cure his color blindness.
Until then, I gave him a smartphone and installed one of the many color identifying apps. He has since replaced it with a non-talking app that allows one to zoom in and display the hex color code of the camera's video input or pictures... Don't remember what it's called off the top of my head, but this "color picker / identifier" should come standard on phones -- I mean, auto white balance is doing just that anyway. It's a failure in accessibility that the data is not surfacable in the default UI.
You are rational.
He is not.
That explains it all.
It's nice to hear about UI research, but at the moment _nobody seems to be making use of the UI research that's already been done._
Consider, for example, the current fad for "mystery meat" UIs (affordances that can't be seen and thus can't be found unless you already know where they are). What's with that? Haven't designers read "The Design of Everyday Things?" Heck, haven't they read the 1983 edition of "Inside Macintosh?"
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
You a jerk! and a big one!
Actually...2nd most annoying!
You mean like vi/vim and emacs?