A new book from Addison Wesley offers to demystify the design of effective user interfaces. In User Interface Design for Mere Mortals, author Eric Butow suggests that successful UIs are enjoyable to interact with, but also save time, eliminate frustration, and minimize user effort.

(Click for larger view of book cover)

Butow provides nine chapters and two appendices to help spoil the fun, at least for some, in designing user interfaces that at best give only a clue about what you can or should do. The author claims that anyone who reads his book will gain “an appreciation of the differences in the 'look and feel' of interfaces for a variety of systems and platforms” and learn “how to go about designing and creating the most appropriate interface for the application or website being developed.”

The book is organized in nine chapters:

• Brief Histories
• Concepts and Issues
• Making the Business Case
• Good Design
• How User Behave
• Analyzing Your Users
• Designing a User Interface
• Designing a Web Site
• Usability

Chapter 3, “Making the Business Case,” makes the case for caring about user interfaces at all. The author writes, “In the days of the Internet revolution from the mid to late 1990s and early2000s, any company related to the Internet — or computing in general — was considered gold. Indeed, many companies without a comprehensive business plan received funding because they were involved with the Internet. Those days are long gone. Although the go-go days are over, what's been left in its wake is a more mature realization about what's needed to survive. You need all the help you can get to beat the competition. And, as always, customer satisfaction is the key to survival and growth. This is why usability analysis is so important.” In chapter 4, the author moves on, perhaps a bit slowly, to tell you about good design.

Eric Butow is CEO of Butow Communications Group (BCG), a technical writing and Web design firm based in Roseville, Calif. He has authored or coauthored eight books since 2000, including Master Visually Windows 2000 Server, Teach Yourself Visually Windows 2000 Server,FrontPage 2002 Weekend Crash Course, C#: Your Visual Blueprint, Creating Web Pages Bible,” “Dreamweaver MX 2004 Savvy,” “The PDF Book for Microsoft Office,” and “Special Edition Using Microsoft Windows Vista.”

User Interface Design for Mere Mortals is available from Addison Wesley. List price is $44.99.

 
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