Microsoft Silverlight Books

Great summation of current UI patterns in a well written and laid out manner. Definitely not dry reading.

Designing Web interfaces by Bill Scott and Theresa Neil is a nice encapsulation on many of the current UI trends for web applications. While the desktop area was dominated years ago with industry standards, and are only now taking on a new revolution with disconnected web products like Adobe Air or new UI frameworks like WPF, the web is still in its infancy regarding UI design. Especially now with AJAX it seems like every year brings on a new set of standards of how UI is supposed to work on the web. This book discusses a very current set of established patterns in a well written and clear format.

While there are several books that speak of web UI and interaction, and thousands of websites, what Scott and Theresa really do well is talk about what patters are in current use, when they are appropriate and many cases where they might not be. They break them down into very manageable sections where you can quickly spot the patter that will work for you. Unlike other patterns books this is filled with hundreds of screenshots detailing every aspect and a lot of great examples. This is not dry reading.

They both draw from their past experience, often showing examples of what worked and what didn't in previous commercial sites they have worked on (like Yahoo), and comment about how things might have been implemented better. They show the various UI patterns in great detail with screenshots and many of the transitions. Often they point out popular websites where a fairly good pattern was implemented for the sheer "coolness" of it, however, in production it simply didn't work and they should have opted for a more subtle pattern. In other cases they point out where changing from one design to another, avoiding a single click such as in Digg, resulted in doubling their user interaction.

This was a great addition to my bookshelf and definitely something I will refer to often.


Matthew Penner
09 February, 2010

Good as a reference book

I was waiting for more from this book. It's nothing more than an reference book on some design patterns.

introfini
08 October, 2009

Super detailed, very informative

I really enjoyed Designing Web Interfaces. If you plan on making a move from being just a visual designer to a user interface designer this is definitely a must read, more details than you imagine there could be about web interfaces!

Jesse Chapo
27 September, 2009

Web Interfaces

Reviewer: Dave Roman, GCPCUG member


This book has 14 chapters, but they are only sub divisions of a different type of classification. The book is about interaction design on the web. They have divided this book up into six principles and since they took this approach I am going to review the principles.

Principle One - Make It Direct
What does that mean? This is covered in three chapters. They discuss direct in-page editing of content, moving objects around directly with the mouse (drag and drop), and applying actions to directly selected objects.

Principle Two - Keep It Lightweight
This area discusses Contextual Tools

Principle Three - Stay on the Page
Here they discuss ways to keep the user on the page including overlays, Inlays, Virtual Pages and Process Flow

Principal Four - Provide an Invitation
This area talks about providing an invitation to the user in a number of forms. Static invitations are offered on the page using visual techniques to invite interaction. Dynamic invitations come into play in response to what and where the user is interacting.

Principal Five - Use Transitions
This area could be entitled "Pay Attention" because it IS about getting your attention using movement and transition. They discuss transition patterns like "brighten and dim", "expand and collapse", "Self-Healing Fade", "Animation" and "spotlight".

Then they go to the purpose of transition. What is the reason for using these powerful effects and where they are most effective.

Principle Six - React Immediately
This is all about what happens immediately after each interaction with the system. There should be an immediate reaction paired with the user's action. The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable time and is called Latency Reduction.

They first talk about lookup patterns and then feedback patterns.

The web is constantly changing, so the authors provide sites to keep you up to date, one of which is http://designingwebinterfaces.com

It's a long book, but does a good job explaining what takes place in an interactive website. This is not a coding book, but more like a combination of the psychology of a web site and how to use this knowledge to make it easier for the user and also make it easier to buy a product or find the information they are looking for.



Frank Mitch
28 August, 2009

A good overview, but could be better

Provides a good overview of the many interface options in use today. However, accessibility is generally not addressed, so you would have to assess this yourself for each option. Also, the screenshots could have been marked up to show the steps in the interactions more clearly, rather than just successive screenshots.

Grimmy
24 July, 2009