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About Face
by by Alan Cooper - Review by Joe Mizer—NOCCC. - July 02, 1999 at 00:14:24:
This book is all about the essentials of good user interface design. Alan Cooper has received the Microsoft Windows Pioneer Award and has been described as a “Software God.” He is known as the “Father of Visual Basic.” This should give you a feeling for the author’s experience. When you start a book you have expectations; however nothing inside the book was as I anticipated. It is accurate to say I was not disappointed with what I found. I expected to find a set of rules I could use for fast and easy creation of earth shattering screens. What I got was nontechnical discussions on style and what is right and wrong with program flow, and the function software should attempt to accomplish. All software should be designed to meet the needs of the user, not satisfy the needs of the programmer.This will probably become a classic in design of software principles. About Face does not present a fixed set of rules that must be followed, but does cause you to consider what is best for each situation. If every complaint the author makes about present software were corrected, the book will still present a way of thinking about interfaces which is important. I felt Cooper presented some of the topics more to cause us to think about the problems than advocating a given solution. It is stressed that software should be designed for the user to complete a task, and interruptions to the flow of work must be avoided. After receiving the book and before reading it I first reviewed some of the comments on Amazon.com’s web page. The reviews were varied from love to hate. It may be that some people were expecting a tutorial on design, not a text that presents you with the author’s views and personal opinions. Cooper points out that the audience for the software you are designing determines whether you use the rules as given or modify it. While reading, I became more aware of the problem of program flow disruption that we live with. Some of the problems Alan points out in this book have actually been changed by Microsoft since this book was originally published. I wish all software manufacturers would read the book again because there are still advances to be made. The list price is $29.99, and is published by IDG-BOOKS. ISBN # 1-56884-322-4 IDG can be found on line at idgbooks.com.
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