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Here are some quotes from industry leaders and readers about Designing From Both Sides of the Screen. "Designing From Both Sides of The Screen explains how computer software, electronic gadgets, and online services can be designed to be more cooperative and less antagonistic, so users are more productive and satisfied. It provides design guidelines and a development process for achieving cooperative products and services. It gives examples of both good and bad designs. It grounds its recommendations in an actual development project. It was co-written by a UI designer and a software engineer, so the perspectives of "both sides of the screen" are well represented.
Read this book! The section on how to prioritize software features, and how to design features based on their priority, is worth the book's price all by itself. "
"This book is full of Dangerous Ideas... technology should be deployed not for its own sake but for ours, decreasing the number of features can actually increase the number of sales, user interface design should drive the system architecture not the other way around, programmers should consult the design specification during development and seek out the designer when new issues arise! Anyone who follows this advice had better be prepared to accept shorter development cycles, higher quality software, and greatly increased user satisfaction.
"Designing From Both Sides of the Screen provides a sweeping introduction to
the practice of user-centered design. The authors describe a fresh approach
to creating software that is personable and service-oriented rather than
frustrating and confusing. But they don't stop there. By putting the reader
inside the heads of both the interaction designer and the software engineer
as a real-life development project unfolds, they provide real insight into
the give and take that's needed to make the designer's vision a reality."
"What a great book! It explains both the principles and the process of UI design so clearly that I'm convinced every developer I work with will 'get it.' I'm making a long list of people — developers and designers — who need to read this book." — Robin Jeffries, User Experience Architect / Distinguished Engineer, Sun Microsystems
Through careful preparation and careful editing you've put together an exceptionally useful book. It takes some real confidence in your central ideas to tell readers that your prescriptions are simple, to state them straightforwardly at the outset, to illustrate them realistically, and then to just let it stand. Congratulations on a great book and thanks. — Doug McNair, reader (designer)
Ever wonder why, if books are almost always read by just one reader at a time, when reading a technical book you feel as if you're in a lecture hall with a distant expert addressing hundreds of students? There's an extra intimacy that's created when an expert is confident enough to address the student as a peer. Ellen Isaacs and Alan Walendowski draw the reader in as an active participant using a superb extended example and a friendly conversational style. It's like the Socratic method but with Socrates as a peer. Two Socrates!
Using an example of an instant messenger that extends over two-thirds of the book, Ellen and Alan not only share their knowledge about usability but also about a real-world software development process. Rather than dictate this, they share their own thoughts as they repeatedly rework their product based on their own concerns and user feedback. It feels as if you joined their small development team and were privy to each obstacle they encountered in a highly iterative path.
This is a book that wont simply collect dust on your bookshelf! I love your book and highly recommend it as an invaluable resource to anyone currently in, or looking to enter, the instructional design field. You've been able to successfully present information, which can often be dry and complex, in a clear and easy to read format. I have a read many books in this area and they're often a fantastic cure for insomnia. However, your book is a compelling read from start to finish. Many of the concepts presented will not be foreign to people that work in this field or in the area of product development. However the logical order and detailed examples work brilliantly to drive home the principles. I found the Hubbub example very useful. Prior to reading this book, I had trouble finding any reference material that clearly linked the steps involved in the 'Design the user interface' process and provided examples of the outcomes (i.e. most books outline a certain number of steps in the process but provide no detail on what corresponding activities and outcomes would look like).
Publishers in this area should use your book as a bench mark for design
and layout for its succinct and logical passage. Thank you very much Ellen
and Allan for such a useful tool! I look forward to Designing from both
sides of the screen: Vol 2 ;-)
From the CHI-WEB newsgroup: What's really need is the addition of "usage" testing. Essentially you build a skeletal version with only the core functionality to get things running (even less than the features intended for launch) and give it to a handful of people to live with for a period of time. Then you follow up with additional research (interviews, surveys, field observations, log analysis, etc.) and refine things. A good new book, Designing from Both Sides of the Screen: How Designers and Engineers Can Collaborate to Build Cooperative Technology by Ellen Isaacs, Alan Walendowski provides a case study where they did this.
(The book is really interesting in other ways, since it was cowritten by an
interaction designer and a software engineer. It's the first book I've seen
that really talks about the push-pull that occurs between the ideal design
and what's technically feasible.)
[Designing From Both Sides of the Screen] is a terriffic text on the practical aspects of designing user interfaces, and its content is directly applicable to what we're currently working on. I'm on Chapter 10 right now, and I'm passing the book directly on to our product manager once I'm done. — Daniel Park, reader (product marketing manager)
The first half of the book goes into detail about the different types of user interface mistakes that are made with certain types of technology. It shows problems with cell phones, PDA's, Web sites, instant messenger applications, windows applications, computer games, and digital camera interfaces. It gives many examples with photos of the products. This first half of the book really breaks down the problems that these devices and applications have with interface design and gives advice and suggestions as to how these problems could be fixed to improve the interface design to make it more cooperative with people. The second half of the book tries to persuade you that this approach to user-centered design is the best way to do it by illustrating how the authors used this approach to build Hubbub, which is their instant messenger application. This second half of the book goes into real depth and detail about their entire process from start to finish for the development of this application. For anyone that wants to design an application, this is a wonderful way for you to learn how it should be done — by showing you the correct process of how the designers and the engineers should collaborate with each other on the project. Their entire project is documented here for you in this book.
I like the way that this book is set up. I think it's a good way to
teach this subject. Spend half the book giving your advice and spend
the other half of the book putting your money where your mouth is and
showing your advice in action with a real world example. It's easy for
people to give advice, but it's hard to prove to people that your
advice is the right advice to listen to. The authors of this book
prove that their advice is the right advice to listen to.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the development process illustrated is the iterative phase that comes after the first usable release of Hubbub is made. This iterative phase incorporates a usage study - and readers without direct experience in this form of gathering feedback will be interested to see an example of the way feedback and observed use from real users can be used to modify a product in light of difficulties encountered.
Designing from Both Sides of the Screen makes an excellent overview to usage-centered design, and illustrates a practical process for the development of user interfaces and their subsequent refinement through usage study. It also provides a rare coverage of the difficulty in resolving the differences of opinion that frequently occur between UI specialists and software engineers.
A very easy to read book, yet packed with useful ideas for building collaborative software. Anyone designing and/or building any computer user interface should read the first part of the book and they will find they enjoyed the rest of the book as well. Highly recommended.
Likes: Content is absolutely perfect, loaded with concise and useful information. The project used throught the book is a great example. The project used is Hubbub, you can see that site at www.hubbubme.com. You are able to follow in the design process of creating a user interface for this chat program - kind of like AOL Instant Messenger, but with a little more personality to it. I would recommend you play with this application as you follow through this book.
Ellen Isaacs and Alan Walendowski know this subject well. Their ability to teach GUI design in one single title completely impressed me. The ability to add this much content, in a concise, easy to read book makes this the top recommendation from me on interface design. This book is so great, it can be used as a textbook to teach the subject.
Recommended Reading by the Fedora Project, a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project: Designing from Both Sides of the Screen by Ellen Isaacs and Alan Walendowski is a very practical "How To" book, similar in spirit to Joel [Spolsky]'s book [User Interface Design for Programmers] but more detailed and not aimed exclusively at programmers. A notable feature of this book is that it skips the colorful rants about bad design and misguided marketing/engineering departments that you'll find in Joel's book or Alan Cooper's book [The Inmates are Running the Asylum]. This makes it a little less entertaining, but if you prefer to stick to the facts, you may well prefer it. It's still a well-written book, and by no means tedious.
The book has two parts; the first is a set of general UI design principles, and the second is a comprehensive walk through of creating an instant messaging application. The walk through demonstrates the process they used to design, implement, and iteratively improve the application. Ellen Isaacs was the UI designer for the IM app, and Alan Walendowski was the main programmer. They talk about give and take between the designer and programmer, and how to balance UI goals with time, resource, and engineering constraints.
See more reviews at Amazon. |
(c) 2002 Ellen Isaacs and Alan Walendowski
