Design and build better software by understanding the motivations of your collaborators.
Illustrates in a step-by-step manner the design processes and presents a practical, hands-on approach to the real world process of designing a user interface (UI).
Offers clear principles and a proven design philosophy, which are easily incorporated into diverse design problems.
Includes a metric to measure how well a design is enabling "flow", a concept described in the book. This book not only offers a sound and proven philosophy for designing and building software, it explores the dialog between designer and software engineer, and offers insights which when applied will facilitate a higher degree of collaboration between them. With a minimal understanding of the values and motivations of one another, these people are often team members standing in adversarial relation to each other. The authors provide background, model effective thought processes and dialogs, and give the readers clear, concrete principles and examples for design considerations. This book is written for both software engineers and designers and illustrates a process which they can use to dramatically increase the quality of both product and process.
Ellen Isaacs has been designing software user interfaces for over 11 years at such companies as Sun Microsystems, Excite@Home, AT&T and Electric Communities (now communities.com). She has designed applications for a variety of platforms including Windows, OpenWindows, the Web, and Palm OS.
Alan Walendowski has been a software engineer working in the trenches for over 15 years. He has worked for companies such as Sun Microsystems, 3DFX, AT&T, IBM, and ComputerVision. Walendowski has worked on device drivers, graphics engines, systems software, distributed systems, client-server systems, and user interfaces.
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