Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Clearly written, thoughtful content
Comment: I enjoyed this book for two reasons:
1. It is nicely structured - whether you read it from beginning to end, or dip into it, it is understandable even if you're not a trained designer (I'm not)
2. It is not tied to a particular technology or interface - Tidewell (rightly) concentrates on desigining for human behaviour rather than for specific devices. So it should (mostly) remain relevant to designers for several years.
Previous reviewers have commented that the design of the book itself left a lot to be desired. However, with one exception (see below) I did not notice anything about the book's design that interfered with my reading experience.
One small quibble. The references are presented in a very inefficient way. The citations in the text are not comprehensive enough for the reader to remember whether or not they have looked at the reference before, and the list of references at the end of the book is highly repetitive: references are listed under chapter headings, so if a reference is cited in three chapters, it is listed three times. This makes me cynically wonder whether the publishers wanted to give the impression of a much longer reference list than was actually cited. I would have much prefered a more scientific approach: cite the reference in the text not only with the title but with the author(s) and year, and list the references at the end in alphabetical order of first author's surname (optionally, each reference could be followed by a list of chapters). As it is, it's difficult to remember if a reference has already been cited, and to look a reference up. A minor detraction in credibility from what is otherwise an authoritative and clear book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I learned virtually nothing.
Comment: There is little (if any) content in here that an intermediate or senior level designer could use. Most of what is in this book is obvious (and if it's not maybe this shouldn't be your line of work). It was a painful read because most of the time I felt like I was wasting my time. I was (I kid you not) already more than halfway through the book when she started talking about using alternating colors to visually distinguish rows of data. Ya, duh? And she is verbose about the most obvious of things, to the point where it's almost hard to read because you think maybe you're missing something, and so you get someone else to read it too and they go, "Huh, didn't she just say the exact same thing in the last sentence but just with different words?" Yes, she did. It's irksome. It's irritating. It's annoying. (See what I mean?) This is a hot dog of a book - all filler.
This might be a good book for a novice, but I wouldn't recommend it for someone who is well into the industry, as you will probably just wish you could get that time back.
The only good thing about it is that you will learn the vocabulary of the industry. It's like a fluffed up data dictionary, that's all. I don't recommend it unless you have time to waste. It's nicely designed though.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Interfaces need Design
Comment: I've always been analytical about user interfaces, and human interfaces in general. Donald Norman's book "The Design of Everyday Things" is an excellent read for how the things we operate with on a daily basis have unintuitive ways of operation.
This book, "Designing Interfaces", shows the pitfalls of navigation and user interaction on the computer environment. One of the major computer magazines (I believe it was PC World) used to have a regular section on renovating a user interface to make it more understandable. This book seems to be the logical follow-up to the ideas there.
One caveat: the printing process used for this book was shoddy, with color diagrams printed with offsets that make them look blurry on the page. The content is valuable, but the way it's illustrated in the book sometimes makes it difficult to understand because of this.
Customer Rating:
Summary: WEB DESIGN IS DIFFERENT FROM BOOK DESIGN
Comment: Jenifer Tidwell's book is excellent, both for its organization and information content. It is indeed unfortunate that the book's designers had so little experience designing books.
From a design viewpoint, their visual structure is well done. However, the choice of an expanded sans serif type, coupled with a 6.5 inch line length makes for poor, difficult readability. The readability standard for line length is 1 1/2 to 2 lengths of the chosen alphabet. In addition, although the book's paper has a matt gloss finish, it is still reflective under a reading lamp, adding to the lack of ease in reading.
I find it interesting that a book that dwells so well on aspects of the various patterns that can be used for good web sites ranks so poorly in the text that describes it. As far back as the 1950's, people like Miles Tinker researched and wrote extensively on what today might be called "patterns for print readability." To find it so ignored in this otherwise excellent text makes me rank it far lower on the scale than it otherwise deserves.
Other books that O'Reilly has published such as Information Architecture for the World Wide Web use an easy to read serif type, and a paper stock that is non-relective under a desk lamp. For a less flashy design, but one that is much more reader-friendly regarding ease of reading the content, look at The Design of Sites, published by Addison Wesley.
Print is still around, and although it is not as compelling an area for new book design as the Web is, good readable design for print still matters.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Tips on everything from navigation and forms to using graphic editors and structuring for actions
Comment: Jenifer Tidwell's Designing Interfaces: Patterns For Effective Interaction Design tells how to design a range of interactive software applications for the web and other services, showing software engineers how to understand the patterns common to design solutions. Here are tips on everything from navigation and forms to using graphic editors and structuring for actions. Color screen shots, graphs and tables pack pages which demonstrate the how, when and why of interface design.
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