Designing Interfaces

AUDIENCE

If you design user interfaces in any capacity, you might find this book useful. It's intended for people who work on:

• Desktop applications

• Web applications or "rich internet applications" (RIAs)

• Highly interactive web sites

• Software for handhelds, cell phones, or other consumer electronics

• Turnkey systems, such as kiosks

• Operating systems

The list might also include traditional web sites such as corporate home pages, but I deliberately did not focus on web sites. They are amply covered by the existing literature, and talking more about them here seems redundant. Also, most of them don't have the degree of interactivity taken for granted in many patterns; there's a qualitative difference between a "read-only" site and one that actually interacts with its users.

Of course, profound differences exist among all these design platforms. However, I believe they have more in common than we generally think. You'll see examples from many different platforms in these patterns, and that's deliberate—they often use the same patterns to achieve the same ends.

This book isn't Design 101; it's more like Design 225. As mentioned earlier, it's expected that you already know the basics of UI design, such as available toolkits and control sets, concepts like drag-and-drop and focus, and the importance of usability testing and user feedback. If you don't, some excellent books listed in the references can get you started with the essentials.

Specifically, this book targets the following audiences:

• Software ...