Description:

Whether you are a professional new to the user-centered design field, or an experienced designer who needs to learn the fundamentals of user interface design and evaluation, this book can lead the way.

What will you get from this book? Based on a course from the Open University, UK which has been taught to over a thousand professionals and students, this book presents an overview of the field. It illustrates the benefits of a user-centered approach to the design of software, computer systems, and web sites, and provides a clear and practical discussion of requirements gathering; developing interaction design from user requirements; and user interface evaluation. The book's coverage includes established HCI topics—for example, visibility, affordance, feedback, metaphors, mental models, and the like—combined with practical guidelines for contemporary designs and current trends, which makes for a winning combination. You get a clear presentation of ideas, illustrations of concepts, using real-world applications.

This book will help you develop all the skills necessary for iterative user-centered design, and provides a firm foundation for user interface design and evaluation on which to build.

 

Table of Contents:

I. Introduction. II. Requirements: How to gather requirements; Users and the domain; Tasks and Work; Thinking about and Describing Requirements; Case Study on requirements. III. Design: Work reengineering and conceptual design; design rationale and principles; Interaction design; Interaction styles; Choosing Interaction devices: hardware; Choosing interaction elements: software components; Case study on Design; Style guides; guidelines and user-centered design; Designing a GUI; Designing for the Web; Design of embedded computer systems and small devices; Case study on requirements, design, and evaluation. IV Evaluation: Why evaluate? ; Deciding on what to evaluate, the strategy; Planning who, what, where, and when; Deciding how to colect data; Final preparations for the evaluation; Analysis and interpretation of user-observation evaluation data; Inspections of the User Interface; Variations and more comprehensive evaluations. V: Persuasion: Communication and using findings; Winning and maintaining support for user-centered design; Summary.