About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design [Paperback]

To be fair, this is an old book (in the IT sense of the word), and a new "About Face 2.0" is apparently hitting the shelves soon. Thank goodness! A lot of the ideas presented in the original are timeless and important, but others have hopefully been relegated to the dumpster.

Goal-directed design, for example, is something that interface designers should never lose sight of. Cooper does an excellent job of digging up the real goals of users (as distinct from their job descriptions) and maintaining focus on how to satisfy those goals while balancing them with other realistic business concerns-profit, professionalism, efficiency, and so forth. He decries the "real world analogy" trap that so many developers fall into and stresses the limits of "metaphors" in promoting user understanding. He stresses the importance of visual feedback for all actions and the need to protect users from "modes."

This is all good material that developers and project teams should always keep handy for the inevitable design arguments. (Although note that the tone of this book is relentlessly programmer-focused, hailing from a time when all "design" was done by coders, and interface or usability specialists simply didn't have a place in IT.)

But when Cooper gets into suggestions for "breaking the mold" and coming up with new and different types of interfaces, he loses me. He seems to vastly overestimate the readiness of users to learn new interface features and new designs. More recent comments from other usability sources acknowledge this basic truth. Joel Spolsky, for example, states that "An interface is well designed when it works exactly the way the user expects it would." Steve Krug states it even more baldly as "Don't make me think!" Don't make me think about the PROGRAM, that is; users are very willing to think about their tasks, they just refuse to waste time learning your cool new interface for what is (to them) just a complicated and badly-designed tool.

Cooper makes sweeping suggestions, such as doing away with file structures and directories entirely, or increasing the reliance on "chord clicking" and triple-clicking for key functions (for power users only, of course). He wants more icons and less text because of space considerations, even though he acknowledges that icons are inherently confusing to new users (idioms-something that can be learned only through experience) and are often poorly executed.

He also introduces several new concepts to the platform, such as a "milestones" feature in word processing. These new notions may perform valuable functions, but at what cost? Their suggested implmentation is awkward and confusing; the terms themselves are hard for non-coders to understand. Do we really want all dialog boxes to have an additional button: "OK, Cancel, Abandon"? It seems that, in his enthusiasm for trying something new and different, he temporarily forgets his own caveat: "No matter how cool your interface, less would be better."

I'm glad that a new version of this book has been developed; hopefully it has retained the core principles and jettisoned the specific examples, particularly the "totally new and different!" ideas. For better or worse, we have a standard for software interfaces now; changes must be approached with caution and delicacy, no matter how much of an improvement they seem to offer. Today's user base won't waste time learning a new interface and doesn't care how "cool" or even valuable it is. Don't forget the focus on user goals-and their goal will never be "learning to use this great new software."

Cooper blows the lid on a dirth of best practices in the doldrums of corporate america (like a good Dilbert episode, only it's for real) : the ways software products (and their creators) make Users feel stupid, and in doing so how typical Micrsoft products fail to win friends and influence people (although they do sell boatloads of product). He picks on Microsoft and developers in general, not beause thery're evil, but because their "hurried to market" products cover thier own shortcomings and idiosyncrasies by blaming the User for their inability to perform.

While your waiting for this book to ship, just repeat the mantra "don't make Users feel stupid". This book pioneered the solution as a User Centered Design process, and the follow-on "Inmates Are Running the Asylum" is like a prequel establishing the need for this design methodology.