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Designing From Both Sides of the Screen

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Buy It! Authors:  Ellen Isaacs Alan Walendowski ISBN:  0672321513 Retail:  $44.99 Pages:  350 Pub:  New Riders

How Designers and Engineers Can Collaborate to Build Cooperative Technology

Written from the perspectives of both a user interface designer and a software engineer, this book demonstrates rather than just describes how to build technology that cooperates with people. It begins with a set of interaction design principles that apply to a broad range of technology, illustrating with examples from the Web, desktop software, cell phones, PDAs, cameras, voice menus, interactive TV, and more. It goes on to show how these principles are applied in practice during the development process -- when the ideal design can conflict with other engineering goals.

While it illustrates the entire development process, the book emphasizes the importance of three phases:

• understanding how people carry out the tasks that the technology will support
• designing a user interface specification up front and then designing the system architecture to support it
• observing people using the system under realistic conditions during development and iterating to smooth out ease of use problems.

About the Authors

Ellen Isaacs is a technology design leader at AT&T Labs. She has been designing user interfaces for over 12 years at such companies as Sun Microsystems, Excite@Home, and Electric Communities, where she worked on systems for Palm PDAs, the Web, Windows, and OpenWindows. Active in the human-computer interaction community, Ellen has designed and studied the use of innovative applications that help people communicate, collaborate, and manage their information. She has a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford University. Ellen can be reached at ellen@uidesigns.com.

Alan Walendowski is a software engineer at AT&T Labs. He has been writing software for 15 years, working for companies such as Sun Microsystems, 3dfx, IBM, and ComputerVision. A "general purpose" programmer, he has developed device drivers, graphics engines, distributed systems, and user interfaces on various platforms, including PalmOS, Solaris, Linux, and Windows. Alan has a bachelor's degree in computer science from Boston University. He can be reached at alan@uidesigns.com.

The authors have developed a Web site to continue the discussion started in this book. Please visit www.uidesigns.com to contribute your comments and questions.

Book Excerpts

• Book Table of Contents
• Chapter 1: On Being a Butler

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Created: January 3, 2002
Revised: January 3, 2002

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