Human-Computer Interaction Books

Lots of good information, examples and GUI theory and all oriented around Delphi 3. Very effective explanations of and reasons for various ways of presenting data and user controls.

The title is a bit misleading because it covers more than just user interface issues. It is clearly written and covers a reasonable amount of ground not found in other books aimed at either more or less experienced Delphi programmers. I like this book and I'm glad I bought it. I can recommend browsing it to see if it can help you too.

I guess the most refreshing thing about this book is that it isn't loaded with fluff. It covers a wide range of design topics that are enforced with working examples that you can put to use immediately. The entire book is on the CD in Adobe Acrobat format, making searches a breeze.

This is a good Delphi book. It doesn't repeat the Delphi documentation. It really adds code that is worth having and talks about issues related to user interface design. However the book needs to address more issues of the user interface design, so this is not a complete book on interface design. But the author did a good job to start the Delphi beginner programmer like me. I really recommend this book if you are a beginner or intermidate Delphi programmer.

The book not only covers issues related to user interface design, but most of it discusses many common programming problems and tasks. The UI sections cover different types of controls and how they can be used to help the user. The remainder, about 2/3 of the book, however is a discussion of some very common problems eg. ensuring only one instance of a program, adding things to the taskbar, talking to the registry, internationalisation, error trapping etc. While the solutions and problems are not "rocket science" they are not the sort of things which can be found in the manuals or the help files. It may not be an "essential" book, but it would be one which you could add to your collection and feel that you have not wasted your money.

I ordered this book a week ago. But I received a book tiltiled
"The Wedding Workout". Do you think if the sender is responsible
for what he did????????????????????

The gates to the human genome have fallen, nano-technology is redefining life itself, and Moore's law continues to work its magic. But is there a dark side to the technology juggernaut? The answer provided by the contributors to this cutting-edge tome is a definite, "maybe." If technology cannot be made more human-centric - designed to respond to human wants and needs - its promise could indeed be thwarted. We from getAbstract strongly recommend this book to anyone whose work helps to hone technology's cutting edge, and for those who just hope to stay on the safe side of the blade.

If you are looking for some sound clues about the future being shaped by information technology, this book is for you. It's informative and insightful about what's coming down the information highway. It's also a good read, even for those of us who are not technocrats, but want to know how technology will affect our lives in the coming years.

This is a collection of eighteen essays that came out of a 2001 ACM conference. The subjects centered around the future of computers in our lives, but some discussed robotics, bioscience, astrophysics and oceanography. Several focused on ubiquity or "ambient intelligence" as one author called it. Written by some leading minds in science, information technology and others, the essays discuss future challenges and possible scenarios in their respective fields.

While a few of the papers leaned to the pretentious or the superficial in their commentary, overall I found the essays to be informative and well written. The learned cast of writers included the likes of Michael Dertouzos (Director of the MIT Computer Science Lab), Alan Kay (a founder of Xerox PARC), Bob Metcalfe (co-inventor of Ethernet, WYSIWYG interface), John Seely Brown (Chief Scientist of Xerox), Rodney Brooks (Director of the AI Lab at MIT), Vint Cerf and Ray Kurzweil,. Most papers had a good list of references for further reading.

As co-editor of NewsScan Daily, the Internet publication focused on the social aspects of information technology, I consider "The Invisible Future" a "Must-Read" because it offers so many thought-provoking essays for people interested in computers, in the future, or the future of computers. Peter Denning has brilliantly edited the book to focus on what 's really important about computers -- both now and in the future, both as they are and as they really ought to be (and will be).

I wish I found this book earlier when I was still a freshman. The contents are well-explained, and easy to understand. I put aside our school's textbook, and used this one instead - helped me a lot!

As a nursing student, this book is used quite heavily by the faculty. The book's infinite charts, tables, and figures are enough to drive you nuts. There are very few good photos. Our nursing teachers were regularly having to use other books to show us photographs of whatever we were studying. Also, after reading the material, I always felt like I didn't really know the material. If I really wanted to know the material well, I had to go study it in an Anatomy & Physiology book.

I have looked at other Med/Surg books and prefer them, any of them, to this one.

This book is more suited for the experienced nurse rather than the nursing student.

Many nursing books are horrible to read and comprehend - NOT this series of nursing books! Easy to understand charts, lists, description boxes, etc. spells terminology and info for newbies easily and appropriately.

By far the BEST nursing series I have ever seen!

As a first year nursing student I thought this book was informative. I also thought this book tried too hard to present the info. in a concise manner. There were charts everywhere! I found the "helpful" charts to be distracting and drew attention away from the important information. I disliked having to look for the case study answers on line. It was difficult to login to their website and annoying to have to do so. Good Luck to future students who have to use this book!

I am also a first year nursing student and the first fundamentals book we used was so useless and hard to read I hated doing my homework. However, this book is so easy to understand and use, especially with the study guide which is also wonderful. I would not trade using any other book for this one. Trust me, you'll really understand what is being talked about.

Suchman's book is a classic (and about to be updated!), but that doesn't mean there aren't any caveats. Suchman's analysis is deep, her writing thick (incredibly terse, dense prose that may require a good dictionary), and her perspective is still controversial.

This book doesn't tell you how to "do" very much - it's not a step-by-step method book. This is a mix of theory and method that will force the engaged reader to reflect on his/her own work.

This book stands as perhaps the best example of a socio-cognitive analysis of technology, and is therefore correctly treated as fundamental in HCI and related fields. For a researcher who is interested in the relationship between technology and people, or technology and the world, this is a must-read. AI and HCI stumble into each other frequently, but this is a book for both audiences.

As for the debate of plans vs. situated action, well, to some extent I find it irrelevant. Suchman never claims that plans don't exist or are unimportant. Even if your work is completely plan-oriented - say, AI planning (e.g. path planning), you should read this book - it will challenge some of your assumptions, and force you to grapple with problems that exist when technology interacts with the world.

That having been said, this is not an introductory reader on HCI, AI, or any other topic. Suchman's terse language frustrates even some very intelligent grad students and PhD's, and again, this book is deep. It's a book that has challenged me as I've read and re-read it over the years, and I treasure it.

This book is not for everyone. Suchman makes connections between AI, HCI and the sociological areas of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM/CA) - connections that have been very visible and influential in subsequent HCI and CSCW research. If you don't have any background in these sociological areas, it will take some work to read it.

That said, I think this book is reasonably accessible, and certainly more so than has been suggested by some reviewers. Suchman was writing to counter a prevalent mindset in the AI community of the time. Basically, Chapters 2 and 3 set up a technical and philosophical strawman (human action as the execution of plans), Chapters 4 and 5 provide an explanation of some necessary theoretical background, and the rest is an analysis of interaction in the context of these theories that serves to knock down the strawman. It's fairly hard to have a more clear and logical organization than that. There's no part of that organization that could be left out and still have the book make sense.

Furthermore, by comparison, the theoretical parts of this book should be easier for the uninitiated to read than are Garfinkel's writings on ethnomethodology (or most CA writings by almost anyone). They may or may not do justice to those ideas, but that's a separate question. And for someone with any background at all in these areas (though as suggested by other reviewers, this does not include a huge number of people), this book should be a very straightforward read.

The bottom line for me is that this book (like Paul Dourish's "Where the Action Is") is an interdisciplinary gem that has the potential to change how you think about how people approach technology. There aren't that many books for which that can be said.

If you do read it, read only the last chapter and the conclusion.

Summary:
Keep in mind that the title of the book is Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human Machine Communication. The majority of the book is the 'plans and situated actions' part.

The basic idea of the book is that humans don't really function using plans. Plans, as the author defines them, are something akin to diagrams for behavior, explicating specific activities. Instead, the author argues that humans behave based on 'situated actions'. Situated actions are, "the view that every course of action depends in essential ways upon its material and social circumstances. Rather than attempting to abstract action away from its circumstances and represent it as a rational plan, the approach is to study how people use their circumstances to achieve intelligent action." (p. 50).

In other words, people have a goal in mind. To achieve their goal, people may or may not set up a plan (the author discusses how this could be culturally relative, but I think this is a weak point in her argument because she doesn't really do a good job of distinguishing one type of plan from another), but what is important is that in trying to achieve their goal they are placed in situations that determine their actions. This could also be said: people behave in specific situations based upon the factors that affect the situation.

Let me give an example... Let's say your goal is to get to the dentist. You set up a 'plan' for getting to the dentist prior to leaving. Your plan would include a calculation of the time and the route and your mode of transportation. The situated action approach would say that you can only understand the individual's behavior in terms of their actions in specific situations. So you get in your car and on the way to the dentist's office you run into a detour due to construction. If you had to follow your plan, you couldn't make it to the dentist. But when you leave the road and find an alternate route, this behavior is only understood in terms of situated action. Does that explain it? Wow, and it only took me a few paragraphs.

The author discusses plans and situated actions in terms of conversations, cognitive science, ethnomethodology, and a whole bunch of other theoretical perspectives and technical jargon. In the end she finally gets to the human and machine communication. This is also where the book begins to get interesting. She studied how people interacted with copy machines that were trying to give people instructions. Her studies, undoubtedly helped the people at Xerox figure out ways to improve their copy machines and instructions for them. Like I said above, the last chapter and the conclusion are the most interesting parts of the book. Skip the rest and read them.

My Comments:
For someone so concerned with understanding how people communicate this book is horribly written and nearly unintelligible. The first six chapters are theory and examples of the theory that are completely unrelated to machines. The book finally gets to human and machine interaction after nearly one hundred pages of inchoate theory. And the human and machine interaction stuff isn't really all that interesting - especially since it predates the 1990s, is talking about interaction with copying machines, and has nothing to do with computers.

The author should have chosen a specific approach and then stuck to it. Perhaps she could have tripled the length of the book and gave clear and understandable explanations of the theories (though I am pretty much convinced after having read the book that this would be impossible because of the author's writing style) and used examples that applied only to human and machine interaction. Or she could have just jumped into her findings that dealt with human and machine interaction. The first approach could have been 'dumbed down' to make the book readable by the general public. The second approach could have served a more academic market.

The book reads something like a doctoral dissertation (it very well may be one, I don't know) in that she gives some information on each theory, but not really enough to give someone a good understanding of it - something like a literature review - and cites examples of research that are completely unrelated to the topic of the book to illustrate the theories . The she presents her methods, results, and conclusion.

I guess my problem is that I was expecting a book that would actually be enjoyable to read, interesting, and would focus on human and machine communication. If that is what you are looking for, look somewhere else. This book is nearly impossible to understand. I read the book for a graduate level course in Ethnomethodology and I didn't really understand it very well. By no means am I an expert in Ethnomethodology, but I'm pretty sure I know more about it than probably 95% of the world's population (keep in mind I don't know very much at all), so I'm pretty confident most people would find this book nearly impossible to decipher.

This is an outstanding book. The insight that showed the power of the idea of `situated action' goes far beyond the realm of interactive design or even human computer interaction in its entirety. It is a fundamental solution to the problem of facing complexity and contingency. Its implications are widespread. This book was published in the 1987 when during the last days of classical AI. This is one of the seminal books that showed the inadequacies of the classical formulation. Indeed it showed a new and much more way of achieving the goals that classical AI set for itself and failed. Despite its age the ides in this book are still fresh and important.

. Absolute certainty is impossible and the quest for it is costly and futile. Instead of trying to overcome the uncertainty that is in the world, the system designer should embrace it and use it as a tool to solve the problems that it creates.

This is a book that should be read by anyone who has set the task for themselves of developing any system that must function in an uncertain environment. In short this is a book that should be read by anyone who is developing a system that will have to function within the real world

This is THE book to start with if anybody is interested in studying interaction design. In a time everybody calls themselves an interaction designer, it's a highly recommended reading to learn there's more to interaction than simply large colourful buttons... Based on an ethnomethodological perspective, Suchman does a brilliant job in analysing users' interactions with an advanced Xerox machine, and putting forth an interesting critique of classical AI concepts. It's highly recommended for anybody interested in Human-Computer Communication and interaction design.

There's a lot words, but no substance. Whenit takes you 3 chapters to get to the point where you can begin to move from generalities to specifics, well, maybe the reader should have been consulted in the design of the outline.

The authors should have paid more attention how they present this issue. Maybe the book was written in very tight schedule. The book repeated itself many times and was really badly edited. The content itself was ok, however nothing really new and not enough good reasoning. All these same concepts are presented in the other literature of UCD and HCI. I suggest Eric Schaffer's book.

From one who has been in the HCI/Usability field for 20+ years, finally a book that documents a sound and thorougly researched approach for interweaving the best-bang-for-the-buck usability engineering techniques throughout the design and development process. The UCD approach documented here focuses on solving real business problems. A critical book for those wanting to implement a sound user-centered design approach in companies.

I am a certified professional ergonomist(software specialist) with over 25 years experience. I wish this book had been publish 20 years ago - it could have saved many hours of work. In a very practical and clear way, this book presents a blueprint for how to integrate the UCD usability process into a project so that your product matches customer needs. The book gives clear step by step instructions on the methods for understanding your customer's requirements and developing a product that matches those needs. The book presents the process in a simple, thorough, cook-book way. Sample forms and case studies are plentiful. In addition to the process, it also covers practical issues such as how to sell UCD to your organization and the cost benefits of UCD. If you are a beginner you will have no trouble understanding the book. If you are an experienced practitioner you may find the material can save you some work. The sample plans, forms, presentations, and project templates alone are worth the price.

As a usability specialist for the past 14 years, I gravitate toward books that I can actually extract from and use their contents, rather than just reading descriptions of a process. The book emphasizes the importance of a multi-disciplinary team and steps us through the different phases of the UCD process. It also includes a great FAQ section. The CD that comes with the book includes movies addressing the various stages of a user-centered design process and many other resources. This is a must-have book for all those involved in developing products and services that people can easily use.

The book was in great condition with little to no markings, as promised. It was shipped out upon order and I receieved it in less than a week.

The book came in fine, but without the softwear. The problem is that the publishing date was not clear when I bought it and the information is really out of date.

The seller provided me with good service in the purchase of my book needed for computer class as directed by the instructor. I received the book within the time designated by Amazon as an estimated time of shipment and arrival. I would buy from this seller again. Thanks!

We ordered the book for my son's freshman computer science class - I was concerned about making sure we had the right edition, etc, and not a single problem - fast turnaround - very pleased.

Done in a format similar to a computer magazine, the topics are covered in a succinct manner, mostly devoid of $20 words that only stroke the author's ego.

An enjoyable read (really!). New 7th edition now available. Probably equally as good. Be sure you order the correct one for your class!

I was looking for concepts related to digital making, and how these techniques can derive from and be informed by traditional making practices(craft). This book delves into those ideas, though not in an intensely focussed manner. I recommend this for individuals interested in the intellectual/philosophical framing of such concepts, histories, and practices of making(craft).

One fear of digitizing art concerns the loss of craft needed to produce objects in physical media. McCullough may not set this fear to rest, but he does present a persuasive case that craft as we know it remains present in new media. He is able to define tools, tool use and tool systems so as to convince one that the tools of program interfaces are as much tools as their physical kin. The distinction between a tool and a machine and how both are represented in a graphic program's interface is especially intriguing. This book would be of interest to the many sculptors who have adopted digital methods into their work, but it may be of most use for human-computer interaction professionals designing 3D interfaces.

A very thorough and easy read for beginners to start thinking what lies beyond the computing technology. This book may be similar with Gate's The Road Ahead, but does not intrigue much ecological vision into abstracting the craft.

A book which explores many issues around the role of the artist utilising new-media. This re-affirms the fact that in all art forms responsibility is upmost. Great read for artists considering using new technology, especially students.

I'm actually in my firsts steps of my PHd in 3d interfaces. Recently I discovered this book wich is guiding me trough the vast univers in where the 3D interfaces interaction is actually. The trans-disciplinary aproach is very important to open new ways of thinking the challenge of improving the post-winp interfaces.I originaly came from design studys so maths and programing answer only a part of my question, and this book is my actual friend that teachs me like i always needed.

I found this rather a disappointment for many reasons. First because of the title. I expected to find ideas that were creative in the context today's art in 3D interfaces. What I found was a grind through the history of 3D interfaces, some creative in their day, no doubt, but well known from many sources today.
Then, I have to wonder how up to date the rest of the book (published in 2006) can be if it tells me that "...a modern mouse may use no mechanical components - movement information being obtained from the reflection of optical signals by a rectangular grid of lines marked out on a mouse mat".
The generally dated tone of the book is well illustrated by the inclusion of 19th century engravings and quotations from literature mainly of the same period and of contrived and strained relevance to the subject. These added nothing to the book and were a distraction.
"A History, Physiology and Neurology of 3-D Displays and Interactive Interfaces" might be a more accurate title, and under that title I would not have bought this volume. It will undoubtedly have its place in academic libraries.

In the repertoire of human skills, both creative three-dimensional design and the visualisation of complex objects must be amongst the most challenging human processes, either to model, to augment or to engage with in any form, by the relevant display and interaction technologies. This book combines both topics.

Given the complementary human/technology character of the book's theme, the authors closely juxtapose a detailed account of human processes and the associated technologies devised to augment the execution of both creative design and visualization.

The fact that the processes of creative design crucially involve human vision, gesture and haptics, accounts for the extensive space given to these phenomena in the book's coverage of interaction interfaces.

The chapters on perception, object depiction and the history of perspective in art are an interesting precursor to the rounded account of today's visual display technologies, including stereoscopic displays, electro-holography and both virtual and mixed reality systems.

The subtitle of the book `A Trans-Disciplinary Approach' is reflected in the broad coverage given to the human-centred and technology-centred disciplines that together make up the table of contents.

The trans-disciplinary ethos is also reflected in the systematic organisation of the individual chapters embodying in each chapter elements of recapitulation, main statements, discussions and end-sections which consist of lists of suggested investigations. Such organization of material and diversity of content will appeal especially to the academic syllabus that practices the trans-disciplinary educational approach.

As one might expect in a book of this kind, the language and treatment will make it equally accessible to science, technology and humanities graduates, whether they are researchers in the area of scientific applications or are designers wishing to gain insights into the technology of their area of creative applications.

The text of each chapter throughout the book is adorned by a sequence of quotations, aphorisms and illustrations from a wide variety of poets, scientists, savants and artists including Albert Einstein, Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare, Coleridge Taylor and Leonardo da Vinci.

Professor Patrick Purcell
Imperial College London

*Above review appears in edited form in BCS magazine "ITNow", July 2006 issue

I found this book interesting & stimulating, it covers some unexpected ground in a thoughtful way. Plenty of references for follow up material and it's the sort of book you can dip into or study. Lots of good content & invaluable to students of both arts & scientific subjects. Some novel research content, I found the chapter on the Renaissance a great read & the Chimenti controversy is dealt with nicely: shame that images aren't in colour but well worth buying, definitely a transdisciplinary read !!

Gives a useful overview in an easy to read digestible tome hence ideal if HCI is a subcomponent of a course you are taking - as it is for me. Recommended for everybody who is involved in professional software development. It's a small book and less that 200 pages at that so hardly onerous and you really ought to be familiar with this stuff.

I am about to pursue a degree program and human-computer interaction is one of the areas of study.

This book has given me an excellent introduction to the subject area. It was very easy and simple reading which gave me the "ESSENCE" of the subject area. Its layout and style would also prove useful for revision just before examinations. All that would be required of me now is to acquire a book that has case studies to build upon this foundation.

I was never aware that there was such an area of study called Human-Computer Interaction. This book has really highlighted the fact that while we may know about system analysis and design we tend to forget some of the "HUMAN" aspects of the user. We design things with the attitude that "the user has to get with the times".

I would recommend this book for reading even by novices.

This book reads like it was simply transcribed from tape recordings of lectures. I closed my eyes and I almost felt like I was sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a lecture hall in Southpark, England. Really, very little effort was made to smooth out the prose. More importantly, the book offers little in the way of insight into HCI. Perhaps this is because this discipline doesn't really have much to offer; I'll reserve judgment on that until I find a better book.

This book starts out with a fairly interesting discussion about memory, vision, and hearing, but then makes essentially no connection between these early chapters and what follows. Except for the Earth-shaking insights that users can't remember a list of more than seven random things, and some people are color blind, etc. there isn't much actionable information that will help you design a better UI.

I suppose the chapters on user testing were somewhat helpful in understanding what HCI professionals need to do to evaluate user satisfaction, but overall the book left me still searching for a better text. At this point I'd say the best book on UI design I've seen so far is Cooper's "About Face."

While there are lots of HCI books around, many concentrate on the theory and recent areas of academic research.

Faulkner, however, endeavours to gently introduce relevant aspects of practical and theoretical HCI.

The book requires no previous or specialist knowledge. The aim is to make HCI skills a part of the general software engineering skill-set that the technical project teams possess.

HCI can be viewed as a specialist skill, but only when it is part of the generic engineering lifecycles will it make its true impact.

With this in mind Faulkner has put together a book that can key you into cconcepts and how they are realised, in quick and simple format.

Although this is not as detailed as some other books on usability engineering, it is not written for that purpose.

It is suitable not only for computer personnel who wish to add HCI to their own projects but also for managers who need to work with usability engineers, entry-level students and possibly end-users who will be required to participate in the usability engineering cycle.

I have never encountered so many grammatical errors, mostly in the form of omitted auxiliary verbs and the like, as in this text. I also found certain chapters poorly written due to a paucity of examples provided for conceptual challenging material.

Otherwise, this is an excellent collection of chapters deeply rooted in the literature.

Working through this book, I am constantly amazed at the number of topics covered and the depth and clarity of the authors (and in some cases, the entertaining story they tell). There is much important theory that exists in HCI and I have not found a book that does such a wonderful job bringing it, and the proper author to explain it, all together. Previously, it was a chore to track down the important theoretical works, not so now.

This book is NOT going to help you build better webpages or for that matter, teach you to build a better GUI. Do not expect it to as HCI is only marginally about this. HCI is more importantly about the work and activity people perform on a computer and through a computer with others. If you do not have this concept in mind, do not read this book as you will waste your time (and possibly write a bad review for it). If you are intrigued, read "The Design of Everyday Things" to give you the basic philosophy of HCI and this book to give you the theory of it.

Unfortunately, some chapters are not as strong as others and the binding of them all together is not as strong as it could be to give a complete picture of the field. That said, this is an important milestone for HCI and should be readable (and read) by all who have taken a basic HCI course.

I've been an information architect for most of my career but I only started teaching college students fairly recently. Now, there's a difference between training professionals (managers and executives) and students fresh out of high school. This book explains everything I need for my students to grasp the importance of human-computer interaction in their future careers. Unfortunately, it suffers from too much scientific jargon. I find myself constantly groping for ways to tone down words such as "one-key with disambiguation", replacing them with simpler terms such as "dictionary". Ironically, chapter 5 discusses the importance of simplifying your language in order to facilitate understanding between the designer (you) and the users (your customers). I guess, they're not really practicing what they preach. My students ask me if they could buy this book as their reference guide, but I shudder to think of the migraine they'd get from trying to wade through the jargons. They're future multimedia artists, not rocket scientists.

It's a difficult book to read. It assumes you are at graduate or post-graduate level and already know a lot about the topic. I am working on my Master's in Interaction Design and I found myself being forced to re-read paragraphs because I had no idea what I just read! On the other hand, the book goes deep into HCI issues and methods and often leaves you with good research questions. If you're looking for a book to help you with real issues related to interface design or product usability, this isn't it. This book is all about theory. It's boring at best.

It all comes down to this: If you're all about theory, this book is for you. If you want to be able to apply what you read to real-world situations - get something else.