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Interface Design: Effective Design of Graphical User Interfaces for the Web and Multimedia Pages

Posted on: Sunday, 17 August 2003, 06:00 CDT

Interface Design: Effective Design of Graphical User Interfaces for the Web and Multimedia Pages. Alistair Dabbs. 2002. New York, NY: Watson-Guptill Publications. [ISBN 0-8230-2516-0. 192 pages, including index. $29.95 USD (softcover).]

Interface design provides an in-depth look into die history of interface design and the elements that comprise what we as computer users have come to recognize as an interface. Alistair Dabbs does a good job of emphasizing the reality that today's digital interface is much more than the standard screen we see on our desktops; interface design encompasses "everything with a screen," including mobile phones, palmtop computers, and handheld devices. The author gives considerable attention to these interfaces as well as the use of animations and 3D in interface design.

The book's greatest strength is the numerous screen shots and graphical representations that are packed into its five main chapters (the sixth chapter is a glossary). Even if you don't read the text thoroughly, you can glean a lot of the concepts in this book just from the examples and their respective call-outs. However, although this book is filled with interesting examples and provides a thorough examination of the latest concepts, it does not provide the "how-to" side of interface design.

Chapter 1 introduces standard concepts and elements in GUI design, such as drop-down menus, dialog boxes, and scrolling, and explains how users have developed strong expectations about how an interface should look and behave. Changing an element's expected appearance or behavior can wreak havoc on the usability of your interface, so Dabbs' advice is to challenge these assumptions, but only after you "take a look backward before charging ahead with your own ideas about what makes a good user interface" (p. 11). Dabbs takes a look at the history and predictable behaviors of many interface elements and provides that look back at many common GUI elements.

Chapter 2, "Graphic elements," looks not only at buttons and icons, but also at basic principles of layout, color management, and legibility. Overall, I find this chapter not particularly useful. Dabbs covers some good topics, such as color management and icon design, but stops short of providing concrete advice about how to implement his ideas. For example, he explains how color needs to be used intelligently to "create consistency and recognition using a small number of harmonious colors" (p. 56). However, he doesn't go much further into explaining how to find these harmonious colors other than using the pre-set design palettes in packaged design software. In the section on typography, the author cautions that as you decrease onscreen type sizes, legibility will suffer, and "you will therefore need to be all the more careful about your choice of font" (p. 65). To support this statement, he provides an example of decreasing type sizes that does demonstrate the decrease in legibility, but, as a designer, I want Dabbs to go further and tell me what font choices would be good to alleviate the poor legibility.

"Links and buttons" is the title of Chapter 3, but it really takes a broader look at the overall concept of navigation. This chapter does offer some practical advice for designing navigation that, again, is strongly based on pre-defined user expectations. For example, navigation buttons should be included on every page in your interface, and these buttons need to provide an obvious way for the user to go forward, go backward, and start over. And, if you're going to stray from the standard "play-stop-pause-rewind buttons" (p. 79), make sure you have a good reason for doing so. Users should always know where they are and where they can go; Dabbs emphasizes that a designer needs to consider the platform that their interface will be viewed on, and rely on the tried and true rules of navigation to design a usable interface. For example, on the miniscule Wireless Application Protocol interface, relying on the "old-fashioned" convention of underlining every hyperlink lets the user know what's what. Chapter 3, like the following chapter, concludes with a "Rogue's gallery" of examples that demonstrate some caveats discussed in the chapter.

The next chapter dives into animations and 3D effects in digital interfaces. As a novice when it comes to most of these concepts, I enjoyed reading this chapter and learning about what's possible in the world of virtual reality interfaces, particularly as Dabbs describes the difference between Shockwave and Flash. However, for a more experienced multimedia developer, this chapter doesn't cover anything that he or she wouldn't already know. Again, Dabbs provides many interesting examples of animations and 3D interfaces, but he is just skimming the surface. I learned what's possible in this realm, but figuring out how to do it would require more research.

The final chapter is a showcase dedicated to interface examples that demonstrate concepts discussed throughout the book. I find the examples of future devices, such as the mobile color videophone and the digital radio, fun to look at, although the examples are only mockups. Other examples shown in this chapter include a look at the operating system redesign that produced Apple's Mac OS X, and a lengthy selection of skins and overlays from Winamp, MUSICMATCH Jukebox, Windows Media Player, and Sonique.

Overall, this book truly sparked my interest in the concept of designing "non-standard" interfaces, which, I've come to realize, will not be non-standard for long. In whetting this interest, the book provides me with a colorful array of screen shots and graphical representations that are fun to peruse and provide some ideas as to what's possible in today's realm of interface design. What it does not provide me with, however, is the "how to" for creating these interfaces. For that, I have to find books that are more technical and delve into the creation of interfaces more deeply than Dabbs does in this publication.

TASHA MILLER is a Web design specialist for Compuware Corporation in Milwaukee, WI. She is currently working on interface design and development for a Web-based financial application. Before joining Compuware, Tasha earned an MA in rhetoric and professional communication from Iowa State University. She is a senior member of STC.

Copyright Society for Technical Communication Aug 2003

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