Preface
Designing the User Interface is written for students, researchers, designers, managers, and evaluators of interactive systems. It presents a broad survey of how to develop high-quality user interfaces for interactive systems. Readers with backgrounds in computer science, engineering, information science/studies/systems, business, psychology, sociology, education, and communications should all find fresh and valuable material. Our goals are to encourage greater attention to user experience design issues and to promote further scientific study of human-computer interaction, including the huge topic of social media participation.
Since the publication of the first five editions of this book in 1986, 1992, 1998, 2005, and 2010, HCI practitioners and researchers have grown more numerous and influential. The quality of interfaces has improved greatly, while the community of users and its diversity have grown dramatically. Researchers and designers deserve as much recognition as the Moore’s Law community for bringing the benefits of information and communications technologies to more than 6 billion people. In addition to desktop computers, designers now must accommodate web-based services and a diverse set of mobile devices.
User-interface and experience designers are moving in new directions. Some innovators provoke us with virtual and augmented realities, whereas others offer alluring scenarios for ubiquitous computing, embedded devices, and tangible user interfaces.
These innovations are important, but much work remains to be done to improve the experiences of novice and expert users who still struggle with too many frustrations. These problems must be resolved if we are to achieve the goal of universal usability, enabling all citizens in every country to enjoy the benefits of these new technologies. This book is meant to inspire students, guide designers, and provoke researchers to seek those solutions.
Keeping up with the innovations in human-computer interaction is a demanding task, and requests for an update begin arriving soon after the publication of each edition. The expansion of the field led the single author of the first three editions, Ben Shneiderman, to turn to Catherine Plaisant, a longtime valued research partner, for coauthoring help with the fourth and fifth editions.
In addition, two contributing authors lent their able support to the fifth edition:
Maxine S. Cohen and Steven M. Jacobs have long experience teaching with earlier editions of the book and provided fresh perspectives that improved the quality for all readers and instructors. In preparing for this sixth edition, the team expanded again to include Niklas Elmqvist and Nick Diakopoulos, who are both new colleagues at the University of Maryland. We harvested information from books and journals, searched the World Wide Web, attended conferences, and consulted with colleagues. Then we returned to our keyboards to write, producing first drafts that served as a starting point to generate feedback from each other as well as external colleagues, HCI practitioners, and students. The work that went into the final product was intense but satisfying. We hope you, the readers, will put these ideas to good use and produce more innovations for us to report in future editions.
New in the Sixth Edition
Readers will see the dynamism of human-computer interaction reflected in the substantial changes to this sixth edition. The good news is that most universities now offer courses in this area, and some require it in computer science, information schools, or other disciplines. Courses and degree programs in humancomputer interaction, human-centered computing, user experience design, and others are a growing worldwide phenomenon at every educational level.
Although many usability practitioners must still fight to be heard, corporate and government commitments to usability engineering grow stronger daily.
The business case for usability has been made repeatedly, and dedicated websites describe numerous projects demonstrating strong return on investment for usab
