About Face
About FaceAbout Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design by AlanCooper, IDG Books, 1995
ISBN 1-56884-322-4 Alan Cooper is touted on the front cover as "Father of Visual Basic", but he seems to have many useful UI thoughts nonetheless. I own the book, but haven't read it cover-to-cover yet.
Some of the tips are excellent:
Just released
About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design by AlanCooper and RobertReimann?, John Wiley, 2003
ISBN 0-7645-2641-3 Looks like a worthwhile update. I like the tip "Don't stop the proceedings with idiocy".
This book is HIGHLY DISRECOMMENDED -- RK, an Interaction Designer!
Essentials of Interaction Design
[This critical review is based entirely on a reading of less than 10% of the book and so was deemed only 90% accurate. Scanning the introduction, contents and targeted scanning of promising chapters has boosted the accuracy to > 99%.]
Okay, there are many myths and misconceptions surrounding AlanCooper, InteractionDesign and his book Essentials of Interaction Design.
First of all, AlanCooper isn't an interaction designer. And his book isn't about interaction design. Neither will it teach you how to do interaction design. And it certainly won't teach you how to do great interaction design.
These myths have been promulgated, confusingly enough, by AlanCooper.
All right, so what do I mean by the above? After all, Alan Cooper coined the term interaction design, so he ought to be authoritative about it, right? Unfortunately that's not so. See AlanCooper and InteractionDesign.
What is Cooper's book actually good for?
Now, imagine that someone reads a book about ExtremeProgramming which never talks about programming per se. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do when the reader is a programmer, but it doesn't actually help anyone when the reader is not a programmer.
In the same way, a non-designer who reads Essentials of Interaction Design will first learn how to go through the motions of the design process without actually learning anything about design. Then, going through the library of mainstream designs, the reader will begin to pick up bits of pieces of interaction design by example in a haphazard manner. So a non-designer ought to come out of it knowing how to do interaction design poorly. A designer will get more out of it.
The most a reader can get out of the book is to learn how to do interaction design consistently. This is what Cooper's methodology is all about. But nobody will get out of Cooper's book how to do great interaction design because nothing in the book teaches that.
It's difficult to make the distinction between process and methodology in this case but the book doesn't actually tell you how to come up with a design, nor does it teach you how to think out of the box. It doesn't teach you how to think, just teaches you what to think about (users, interactions) so that if you know how to think already then you'll think in an interaction design way.
[Pages 95-98 are the only part of the book that deal with the nature of interaction design. Only about a quarter of chapter 7, titled "Synthesizing Good Design: Principles and Patterns" deals directly with design.
Another promising part of the book (Part II) is devoted entirely to providing examples of bad user-object interactions. As worthwhile an exercise as it is, it hardly provides the reader with sufficiently general and powerful tools to identify bad interactions in a comprehensive manner, let alone assign quantitative values to those interactions. And Cooper never contrasts it with good interactions.
I'm convinced that Cooper never deals with identifying or evaluating good interactions at all, which would involve getting into the nature of what makes an interaction positive or negative, as opposed to waxing philosophically about generalities like he does in Chapter 14.]
Neither does the book expose an interaction designer to any genuinely new concepts of interaction design, or even to the state of the art in interaction design. Because contrary to Cooper's opinion, many of the designs he raves about really aren't that good. They just happen to be common and Cooper simply never presents alternatives developed in the course of HumanComputerInteraction research.
No really, what is Cooper's book actually good for?
It's good for interaction designers who know exactly what they're doing, the kind that have a stack of unread HCI papers on their desktops. They'll use it as a compendium of mainstream UI crap against which they can measure the UI designs they come up with. Yes, UI. Useful examples in the book are pretty much restricted to that.
It's also good as ammunition against programmers and business types. Programmers are used to reading crappy books anyways so it's not like their brains aren't already fried as is. Unfortunately, I have the dreadful feeling that programmers reading this book will end up biting interaction designers in the ass.
What exactly happens to a project when a programmer takes it into his head that he can do interaction design? Oh, right, maybe the project won't go down in flames and will just get stuck with a bad product. Now what happens to a project when a software developer decides they can do interaction design instead of hiring an actual interaction designer? Ouch.
Ouch because most programmers who design a great system end up never repeating the experience. It's an accident they can't repeat. Either that or they literally repeat it, which is worse. Case in point, AlanKay's Smalltalk.
Actually, great design by programmers is largely restricted to languages. Which goes some way to explain why languages are so fetishized by CS students. They may not be able to do it, they may not even understand it, but even programmers tend to appreciate great design at some level.
Ultimately, if we needed a propaganda book to use against programmers and managers, Alan Cooper is much too incompetent to do the job. Oh wait, TheInmatesAreRunningTheAsylum was a decent propaganda book. So ... why exactly does AboutFace exist?
The book as a book
Even after reading how CooperInteractionDesign differs from InteractionDesign, and how AlanCooper is not an interaction designer, and how this book is not about interaction design per se, a few comments about the book as a book seem to be in order.
The writing of the book is miserable. There is no characterization, no plot, the prose is heavily redundant, and so on. As a literary work, it sucks bowling balls through a straw and it is simply a chore to read. Apparently, this utterly miserable state of affairs is expected of technical writing, especially when you invoke the excuse of "reference material", but it doesn't make it any more forgiveable.
Who's Cooper's target audience: programmers or interaction designers? What are their needs: a reference or a story? Cooper obviously hasn't applied his own methodology of interaction design to his book on the subject because he's come up with a monstrosity trying to combine all four possible answers. Which fact is only confirmed by all those itty bitty little charts that are completely un-freaking-readable because someone was too stupid to span them across multiple pages.
Is Cooper selling snake oil he doesn't believe in or is he just an idiot? Unfortunately, the methodology Cooper describes is fairly functional, which would put him squarely in the idiot camp. Just as a graphic designer can't be forgiven an ugly book on the subject of graphic design, an interaction designer simply cannot be forgiven a horrible reader experience in a book whose subject is interaction design.
In fact, an interaction designer can't even be forgiven for not making his book available on the godsdamned web! Especially if it's supposed to be a reference manual.
I begin to see exactly why AlanCooper is scorned and hated. Actually trying to read his book, as opposed to looking up a few facts of professional interest, is making me rapidly conceive an intense loathing of the man myself.
I didn't learn anything from your rant.
all those itty bitty little charts that are completely un-freaking-readable because someone was too stupid to span them across multiple pages.
The charts are silly anyway. Just ignore them. They remind me of the scene in DeadPoetsSociety where they try to measure the greatness of a poem by doing an integration of a graph.
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