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About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design Review by Joseph Reddy
Good theory and some practical advice
I'm glad I finally got around to reading About Face. Like the book, I can put off UI development, but eventually I have to face reality and get it done, and get it done right.
The About Face authors build heavily on the most memorable aspect of another book I recommend called The Design of Every Day Things. This central theme is that we build the user interface to reflect the user's model of the system, not our model and definitely not the implementation model. The book stresses making the user happy which requires us understanding their model along with their wants, needs, context, and motivation.
The writers are fanatics, as you would imagine they would be, to take the time to write a book on a subject obviously near and dear to their hearts. Some of their advice may seem a little impractical for the common business application developer, for example, cutting out people from magazines to help put faces on users. That said, this is not exactly bad advice, and very similar to the efforts Microsoft put into creating the personas of Mort, Elvis and Einstein. There is plenty of practical advice beyond the equivocal "user model" like trying to provide modeless feedback, not popping up windows for everything, designing for the probable case and providing for the possible, anticipating needs, avoiding clutter and too much on a single window, etc, etc. Great stuff for new developers and fantastic reminders for the experienced ones. I should skim my notes from this book every time I am about to embark on some UI development.