Designing Interfaces, 2nd Edition

Preface

Once upon a time, interface designers worked with a woefully small toolbox.

We had a handful of simple controls: text fields, buttons, menus, tiny icons, and modal dialogs. We carefully put them together according to the Windows Style Guide or the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, and we hoped that users would understand the resulting interface—and too often, they didn’t. We designed for small screens, few colors, slow CPUs, and slow networks (if the user was connected at all). We made them gray.

Things have changed. If you design interfaces today, you work with a much bigger palette of components and ideas. You have a choice of many more user interface toolkits than before, such as the Java toolkits, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and numerous open source options. Apple’s and Microsoft’s native UI toolkits are richer and nicer-looking than they used to be. Display technology is better. Web applications often look as professionally designed as the websites they’re embedded in, and some of those web sensibilities have migrated back into desktop applications in the form of blue underlined links, Back/Next buttons, beautiful fonts and background images, and non-gray color schemes.

But it’s still not easy to design good interfaces. Let’s say you’re not a trained or self-taught interface designer. If you just use the UI toolkits the way they should be used, and if you follow the various style guides or imitate existing applications, you can probably create a mediocre but passable ...