Category: Reading

Pink = highly recommended!

Information Appliances and Beyond

Eric Bergman ed. One of the best interaction design books to date. With case-studies on various design problems from Palm OS usability to Nokia contextual design issues. Just enough detail and anecdotes to get a good sense of design process.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Humane Interface

Jef Raskin. An absolutely essential book for anyone developing an interactive product. Raskin explains some excellent ideas for usable interfaces that are better suited to large file systems and the internet.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Designing Visual Interfaces

Kevin Mullet, Darrell Sano. A useful book with plenty of visual examples on how to simplify and enhance desktop interfaces.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Dust or Magic: Secrets of Successful Multimedia Design

Bob Hughes. Somehow forgotten, this book gives a great overview for successfully designing rich multimedia interfaces.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Reinventing the Wheel

Jessica Helfand. Plotting the history and design of information wheels, those interactive tools that can tell you the cooking time of an egg to the blast radius of a nuclear bomb.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design

Brenda Laurel ed. A collection of dated (early 80s) essays that begin to see interface as a design discipline. Complex and theoretical.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Designing the User Interface

Ben Shneiderman. Really thorough book, concentrating heavily on software interface design from a programming perspective.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Bringing Design to Software

Terry Winograd. A dialogue around the design process in software development.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Plans and Situated Actions

Lucy A. Suchman. A new approach to interaction design using new social science models.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

GUI Bloopers

Jeff Johnson. A lighthearted book highlighting common interface mistakes.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum

Alan Cooper. Really good ideas to solve common interface design issues. Cooper shows that the biggest problem in interaction design is that it is controlled by the developers and programmers, and advocates the need for interaction designers at every level of software production.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Apple Human Interface Guidelines: The Apple Desktop Interface

Apple Computer. The original guidelines for developing MacOS GUI interfaces. The version for MacOS X can be downloaded from apple.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com