As predicted by many visionaries, devices everywhere are getting "smarter". My camera has a multi-modal hierarchical menu and form interface. Even my toaster has a microprocessor. Computing is not just for computers anymore. So when the authors wrote the subtitle "beyond human-computer interaction", they wanted to convey that the book generalizes the human side to people, groups, ..., and the computer side to desktop computers, hand-held computers, phones, cameras, ..., maybe even toasters.
My own interest in this book is motivated by having been a software developer for 20 years, during which time I was a professor and consultant for 12. Would the book serve as a textbook for students? Would it help bring software development practice into a new age of human-centered interaction design?
A textbook for students ...
More than anything, I think students need to be motivated, inspired, challenged, and I think this book, particularly Chapters 1-5, will do that. Many students will not have the motivating experience of seeing projects and products fail because of a lack of attention, understanding, and zeal for the user, but as I read the opening chapters, I imagined students thinking, "This is what I've been looking for!" The interviews will provide students with the wisdom of well-chosen experts: what's important, what worked (and didn't), and why. I see students making career choices based on this motivating material.
The rest of the book covers the art and some of the science of interaction design, the basic knowledge needed by practitioners and future innovators. Chapters 6-9 give a current view of analysis, design, and prototyping, and the book's web site should add motivating examples. Chapters 10-14 cover evaluation in enough depth to facilitate understanding, not just rote application. Chapter 15 brings it all together, adding more depth. For each topic, there are ample pointers to further reading, which is important because interaction design is not a one-book discipline.
Finally, the book itself is pedagogically well designed. Each chapter describes its aims, contains examples and subtopics, and ends with key points, assignments, annotated bibliography (for more detail) and references.
A guide for development teams ...
When I lead or consult on software projects, I face the same problem over and over: Many people in marketing and software development -- these are the people who have the most input into design, but it applies to any members of multidisciplinary teams -- have little knowledge or experience building systems with a user-centered focus. A user-centered focus requires close work with users (not just customer/buyers), from analysis, through design, evaluation, and maintenance. A lack of user-centered focus results in products and services that often do not meet the needs of their intended users. Don Norman's design books have convinced many that these problems are not unique to software, so this book's focus on interaction design feels right.
To help software teams adopt a user-centered focus, I've searched for books with end-to-end coverage from analysis, to design, to implementation (possibly of prototypes), to evaluation (with iteration). Some books have tried to please all audiences and have become encyclopedias of user interface development, covering topics worth knowing, but not in enough detail for readers to understand them. Some books have tried to cover theory in depth and tried to appeal to developers who have little interest in theory. Whatever the reasons for these choices, the results have been lacking. This book has chosen fewer topics and covered them in more depth, enough depth, I think, to put the ideas into practice. I think the material is presented in a way that is understandable by a wide audience, which is important for the book to be useful to whole multidisciplinary teams.
A recommended book ...
I've been waiting for this book for many years. I think it's been worth the wait.
As the director of the HCI Bibliography project (www.hcibib.org), a free-access HCI portal receiving a half-million hits per year, I receive many requests for suggestions for books, particularly from students and software development managers. To answer that question, I maintain a list of recommended readings in ten categories (with 20,000 hits per year). Until now, it's been hard to recommend one book from that list. I point people to some books for motivation, other books for process, and books for specific topics (e.g., task analysis, ergonomics, usability testing). This book fits well into half the categories in my list and makes it easier to recommend one book to get started and to have on hand for development.
I welcome the commitment of the authors to building a web site for the book. It's a practice that has been adopted by other books in the field to offer additional information and keep the book current. The site also presents interactive content to aid in tasks like conducting surveys and heuristic evaluations. I look forward to seeing the book's site presents new materials, but as director of www.hcibib.org, I hope they use links to instead of re-inventing existing resources.
He has also held research and academic positions at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie-Mellon University, and Ohio State University. Dr. Perlman's Ph.D. is in experimental psychology from the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of over 75 publications in the areas of mathematics education, statistical computing, hypertext, and user interface development. He has lectured and consulted internationally since 1980.
He is best known in the HCI community as the director of the HCI Bibliography (www.hcibib.org), a free-access online resource of over 20,000 records searched hundreds of thousands of times each year.
A native of Montreal, Canada, Gary now lives in Columbus, Ohio, USA with his wife and two sons.