What are the issues in designing an interface that is clean, easy to understand, and easy to use?
What are things to be considered?
What are things to be avoided?
What are good over-all philosophies of UI design?
Reading the questions posted, I'd recommend becoming familiar with the broader principles that inform nearly any sort of design; then narrow your reading and research to specific GUI-oriented design.
Developing a healthy sense and understanding for what makes an effective user experience is important to any sort of consumer design work (and effective UI design definitely is about understanding your consumer/target audience); "usability" as a discipline has yielded to the larger field of Experience Design (XD) as a key area of study for GUI-designers.
Let's start from the 10,000-foot view:
Books I'd recommend for your conceptual skills are:
--Bill Buxton's *Sketching User Experiences: Getting the design right and the right design*. Bill's background at Xerox PARC and later at SGI/Alias|Wavefront (creators of the Maya 3D CGI software, among others) have made him a pretty revered figure in the industry. This book's a terrific primer on the process of thinking about design.
--The upcoming O'Reilly release, written by Adaptive Path, *Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World*. What's the distinction between product and service? Adaptive Path--the outfit from which came Jesse James Garrett's seminal white paper on Ajax three years ago--started thinking about this as they examined the success of the iTunes and iPod experience; the book grew from there.
Moving down to 5,000 feet:
For best-practices from the usability perspective (hey, an easy-to-use site usually has a well-designed GUI), it's hard to beat the two canonical books:
--Steve Krug's *Don't Make Me Think!* (now in its second edition)
--Jakob Nielsen's *Designing Web Usability*
Both books arrived as website usability emerged as the successor to the David Siegel School of "third generation web design" in the late 90's. Nielsen codified usability best practices through a research-intensive method, and Krug made usability accessible for the creatives who thought Nielsen a bit pedantic. Solid, foundational material that hasn't needed radical revising in nearly 10 years.
Ground-level:
Here's where you and/or your team go to work, and I heartily recommend you check out another O'Reilly title, *Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design*, by Jenifer Tidwell. There are several solid tutorials out there on in-the-trenches GUI design, but I've still seen nothing as effective as this one.
Hoping this helps,
--Steve Weiss
Executive Editor
O'Reilly Media
Links:
http://www.billbuxton.com/http://adaptivepath.com/http://www.useit.com/http://www.sensible.com/http://jtidwell.net/
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What are the issues in designing an interface that is clean, easy to understand, and easy to use? What are things to be considered? What are things to be avoided? What are good over-all philosophies of UI design? Reading the questions posted, I'd recommend becoming familiar with the broader principles that inform nearly any sort of design; then narrow your reading and research to specific GUI-oriented design. Developing a healthy sense and understanding for what makes an effective user experience is important to any sort of consumer design work (and effective UI design definitely is about understanding your consumer/target audience); "usability" as a discipline has yielded to the larger field of Experience Design (XD) as a key area of study for GUI-designers. Let's start from the 10,000-foot view: Books I'd recommend for your conceptual skills are: --Bill Buxton's *Sketching User Experiences: Getting the design right and the right design*. Bill's background at Xerox PARC and later at SGI/Alias|Wavefront (creators of the Maya 3D CGI software, among others) have made him a pretty revered figure in the industry. This book's a terrific primer on the process of thinking about design. --The upcoming O'Reilly release, written by Adaptive Path, *Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World*. What's the distinction between product and service? Adaptive Path--the outfit from which came Jesse James Garrett's seminal white paper on Ajax three years ago--started thinking about this as they examined the success of the iTunes and iPod experience; the book grew from there. Moving down to 5,000 feet: For best-practices from the usability perspective (hey, an easy-to-use site usually has a well-designed GUI), it's hard to beat the two canonical books: --Steve Krug's *Don't Make Me Think!* (now in its second edition) --Jakob Nielsen's *Designing Web Usability* Both books arrived as website usability emerged as the successor to the David Siegel School of "third generation web design" in the late 90's. Nielsen codified usability best practices through a research-intensive method, and Krug made usability accessible for the creatives who thought Nielsen a bit pedantic. Solid, foundational material that hasn't needed radical revising in nearly 10 years. Ground-level: Here's where you and/or your team go to work, and I heartily recommend you check out another O'Reilly title, *Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design*, by Jenifer Tidwell. There are several solid tutorials out there on in-the-trenches GUI design, but I've still seen nothing as effective as this one. Hoping this helps, --Steve Weiss Executive Editor O'Reilly Media Links: http://www.billbuxton.com/ http://adaptivepath.com/ http://www.useit.com/ http://www.sensible.com/ http://jtidwell.net/