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A UI Designers Reading List

By Allen Holub

October 1, 2005 — (Page 1 of 3)
It doesn’t matter how good your program is under the covers. If the user interface is miserable, people won’t use it. My last column discussed how the UI integrates into the design process as a whole. This week I’ll discuss a few books that can help you use the UI in this way.

My favorite book on developing a good user interface is Larry Constantine and Lucy Lockwood’s “Software for Use: A Practical Guide to the Models and Methods of Usage-Centered Design” (www.foruse.com).

Lots of books on UI development provide you with nuggets of wisdom about things like layout and usability. These books talk about what works and doesn’t work in the UI itself, such as where to put the buttons and what fonts to use. The problem with this approach is that the books are so focused on the minutiae of the UI that they lose track of the big picture: A program must do something useful, and the UI should help the user accomplish his goals with a minimum of fuss. Reading a book of this sort is like reading a book on language pitfalls before you learn how to program.

Constantine and Lockwood take a different approach. They are not at all concerned with things like look and feel; rather, they show you how to develop an “abstract” user interface that mirrors the natural flow through the tasks users must perform to do their work. Once you’ve done that, adding the “art” is easy.

The book focuses on use case analysis, which is also a fundamental part of developing your object model. That is, they identify the fundamental tasks that the program has to accomplish, and then design a UI that walks you through those tasks in an efficient way. By basing the UI design on the use cases, you guarantee a coherent integration of the user interface and the object model that makes the program easier to build and maintain as well. The UI is not a veneer on the top of the code; it’s a visual representation of the code itself.

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