Usability Engineering

Foreword

Terry Winograd

Stanford University

Designing good interactive software is neither a science nor an art. It is not yet a matter of routine engineering, yet there is far more involved than native skill and intuition. In years of teaching human-computer interaction design, I have often felt frustrated in trying to capture for students the experience of creating useful, useable, and likeable interactive systems.

Many pitfalls and breakdowns lie on the path to learning good interaction design. First, students need to encompass the breadth of concerns that go into designing any real system. Everything from the social context of the users to detailed keystroke analysis may be of significance, and it might even make the crucial difference ...