Human-Computer Interaction Books

This book has many of the classic articles about computers and our society. The GNU Manifesto is included. There is an excellent article about whistle-blowing. I read this text many years ago in my Computer Ethics course. I really enjoyed the class and this book.

As a teacher of a course entitled "Information technology in a global society" i have found this book an excellent resource for both myself and my students alike. It's simple enough for an entry level reader (I have had kids as young as 11 discussing the ethical considerations presented in the book). While on the other hand it contains enough specifics and case studies to make it a suitable source for high school students preparing papers on a variety of topical issues.

What I love is that you can pick up the book and find the relavant information your looking for without having to read the whole book.

This is not one of those "intro to" books that water down the subject and leave you falling asleep at your chair. It's a dynamic introduction to exciting debates over technology, at the same time that it presents the case to think about technology along with culture rather than in opposition to it. Some great readings of art too, and the relation of art/artists to the question of technology. It also lays the groundwork for the recent theorizations of technology in books like Transductions: Bodies And Machines at Speed (Technologies: Studies in Culture & Theory). I highly recommend Culture and Technology - both for readers looking for an introduction to debates on technology, and to those interested in some good thinking on the question of the intersection of culture and technology.

From what I've seen, this book contains one of the best overviews of people and ideas that have influenced this field for the past few centuries. It's dated 2003 so includes some very recent material as well.

A huge contribution to a rapidly developing area of our lives and the future. Written with balance and interest it informs, yet poses further questions of pertinent relevance. Excellent value and of huge use to me in my Geography studies.

Very nice book with a lot of interesting thoughts about how cyberspace can be conceptualised. If you are interested in a more theoretical approach,then you have to buy this book. Social, political, economic implications of cyberspace are discussed, very helpfull handbook if you're working on empirical studies in/about cyberspace.

The correspondence between this work and that of Alan Cooper (The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity and About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design) are staggering. Dr. Endsley and her co-writers rail about how a technology focus leads to poor user interfaces, and recommend a user-centered design approach including "Goal-directed Task Analysis." Alan Cooper rails about how a technology focus leads to poor user interfaces and recommends a user-focused approach he calls "Goal-Directed Design." The difference between this book and Cooper's books is the wealth of dramatic examples and underlying research in Designing for Situation Awareness.

Situation Awareness refers to the OO of the OODA loop - getting input from the environment - Observing - and understanding the significance of that input now and in the future - Orienting. It is a concept used widely in aviation, medicine, and the military - areas where life and death decisions are routinely made based on situation awareness.

One study cited in this book identifies flawed situation awareness as the root cause of 88% of aircraft crashes due to human error. In the remaining 12% the wrong decision was made or there was a problem with execution. With these sobering figures, this book lays out design guidelines to enhance situation awareness.

A formal situation awareness design approach would involve realistic prototyping and rigorous testing as you'd expect for anything related to aviation or medicine. This book provides 50 concrete design principles in six different areas to assist this formal design cycle, but as the book says: "These principles can be applied to a wide range of systems from a variety of domains where achieving and maintaining SA [Situation Awareness] is challenging."

Anyone designing interfaces to support situation awareness or quick comprehension - like performance dashboards - can learn from this book. Unlike software design examples, the examples in this book contain flight numbers and phrases like "killing all aboard" that underscore how very critical situation awareness is, and how driven the authors are to help raise the standards of design.

The only minor criticism I can level is a feeling that this book was rushed together; but with the critical importance of the topic I can see why. I look forward to the recently announced second edition.

This is a Should Read for anyone involved with the design of information technology to support complex problem-solving and decision-making in any setting. It's a Must Read for anyone working with highly dynamic situations or critical situation management, including emergency and disaster response. Dr. Endsley and her co-authors not only lay out a very thorough explanation of the design challenges imposed by human cognitive behaviors and limitations, but also review in depth the research that reveals these behaviors and limitations. They then present a very comprehensive set of guidelines for addressing these challenges in design.

Chapter 4 should be required reading for all user interface design practitioners and students. In this chapter, Dr. Endsley (who comes from the human factors and ergonomics field) and her colleagues lay out a much better description of the process of designing and developing user interface software than any I have seen anywhere in the human-computer interaction or software engineering literature.

This book is the result of years of exhaustive research that sets a gold standard for use-inspired basic research. It is useful to researchers as well as practitioners. I am in awe of the quality of the work and the quality of the results.

I'm researching systems-development related topics at the moment and this book is one of the few I've encountered that gives an abundant amount of carefully considered information. Most books, it seems, can be summarized in a sentence or two. Dillon's work, on the other hand, is one of the most detailed--and purposeful--I've seen. I'd recommend this book not only to text designers but anyone interested in user-centered design. Its implications for users (who are often scanners, not readers!) are broad and significant, encompassing motivations (why people read, or why they visit websites and what they expect to get out of their experience) and navigation and wayfinding issues. Another useful component of the book is its discussion of using models and frameworks as a tool to faciliate structured research and development. Many thanks to Dillon for providing a first rate book on a pervasive, yet largely ignored topic. I look forward to seeing more of his work in the future.

This is by far the best analysis of reading of electronic text that I have seen. He provides an excellent insight as to what is, what might be, and what is not important for on-screen reading.

He does not limit text to just fiction/non-fiction categories, but instead discusses: WHY it is read professional/personal reasons, to learn or not, out of interest/need, etc. WHAT type of information it contains technical or non-technical, subject matter, general or specific, textual or graphic, etc. HOW it is read serially or non-serially, once or repeatedly, browsed or studied in depth, etc.

His book suggests to me that text should alter its format to the meet the users - Why, What, and How. Possible examples: switch to all caps when searching for words or phrases, turn off hyperlink indicators for linear reading, ...

He points out that there have been many studies on editing text, but few on reading text. A good fraction of the book deals with on-screen reading.

Screen reading was better with: high resolution characters, increased space between lines (leading), proportional font, limiting the number of characters on a line, and not splitting a sentence across a page boundary.

He indicates that users preferred on-screen reading over paper reading for some tasks when the screens had enough improvements.

Screen reading might be improved with: landmarks/navigation, serif fonts, full left/right justification, ...

Screen reading was no different than paper reading for: orientation of the media, flicker rate, screen dynamics, and visual angles (< 36 degrees).

This book is a wonderful look at the background and future of interaction design. McCullough provides wonderful depth of understanding for the reader on the many discipline that support interaction design: psychology, architecture, cultural anthropology, technology. Not only does McCullough draw the disciplines together nicely, it is done seamlessly to the reader.

My copy is now filled with highlighter marks and it a book I will be returning to for my profession and through time. If you are a fan of well developed end notes to find further information, this book is a charm.

The book digital ground presents new ideas about place and technology. I was particularly struck by the idea of technologies piling up at a place -an interesting problem is how this pile of technologies can be organized into a useful whole - device ecologies, and an extensible system (hardware and software) that can grow over time (and be subject to changes, e.g. devices removed, replaced, added,etc). Another interesting idea is how certain places fulfill or serve different aspects of life or functions, and the technology at a place should then be in accordance with the corresponding aspects of life or functions at that place, or at least be attuned to or be aware of context necessary for such functions and related activities. There are also other interesting ideas and underlying theories in the book which makes it an interesting read, and not only for architects and builders but computer scientists!

a very good book for all the begineers in ebooks industry, it explain all the details in a very clear and easy-to-understand method.

I bought this book because I wanted to understand what electronic publishing is about and what the future might hold. I also wanted to understand if I could publish my own novel and how I could go about using tools like Microsoft Word or Framemaker to do so. I found the book was a good read and the history of electronic publishing was pretty interesting, I didn't know the first printed books were printed to look like handwritten books. My questions about how to publish my own books were mostly answered and the information on tools and fonts was helpful. The CD that comes with the book was very handy as it had the entire book in PDF format and I could do a full text search on the book, so when I wanted to search on something like fonts, I could find every hit in the book. Also some sample ebook chapters on the CD showed me how I could publish multiple ebooks from Word. The section where experts from companies like Microsoft talked about the future of epublishing was also good.

You have to be a computer geek to understand the humor. If you are, and especially if you have a unix/linux background and/or have worked with internet or other computer support you will find this one of the most hysterical comics around.

The characters fight to stay awake with the geek drink of choice, prepare for covert operations at Columbia Internet, obsess over Quake, and live in cramped quarters called cubicles.

Apple, Microsoft, COMDEX, AOL, and other bigwigs are the subject of a few pokes. Even Clippy makes a guest appearance. This one like the other books is a history book of geeky events that occurred in recent years with a funny bone added. But, students, do not use this to study for that next history exam!

Warning, serious sentence ahead. This book includes 9/11 tribute cartoons that have been drawn and handled with respect.

If you're not familiar with User Friendly, go to its site (www.userfriendly.org) to get a taste of it and get to know Greg, Stef, Mike, and Dust Puppy, the UF mascot. The other editions available are User Friendly, Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell, and The Root of All Evil. Those whose companies have strict rules about Internet surfing can surf the book to get their UF fix. Don't get mad at users, read User Friendly.

Prevailing e-commerce and e-business applications are form-based, i.e., the user interaction with the systems is via a set of forms. This book presents a formal yet practical integrated solution to the design, analysis and specification of such applications. The formalism presented in the book draws on intuitive understanding of form-based systems in which the form allows interaction via message passing. The formalism allows abstraction from unnecessary details and focusing on the design and analysis of the business logic and its effect on the form.

On the practical side, the book presents a host of diagrams such as formcharts, page diagrams and screen diagrams to deal with different aspects of form-oriented design. Considering the limitations of diagrams, the authors also present a domain specific language called Dialogue Constraint Language that extends the Object Constraint Language (OCL) to accommodate the specification of dialogues in form-based applications. Relying on such a wealth of modeling artifacts, the book proposes a set of methods for the modeling of the data and communications between the different components of a form-based system.

This is a must have book for the professional analyst, modeler and programmer involved in the design, specification or development of form-based projects. The book provides the methods and the artifacts to better model form-oriented systems.

Kyriakos Anastasakis and Behzad Bordbar

This is a book that has been needed for a long time. There have been studies in the past, indeed a body of knowledge even, on the design of paper based forms. The problem with computer based forms such as those for ordering a book from Amazon is that the forms tend to be generated by programmers, not forms specialists. In fact in this book the examples being used are from a hypothetical on line book store.

At one point the authors are giving an example of a book page of an online bookshop. On it they give an abstract of their own (that is this) book. It reads: "What is the business logic of n enterprise system? How do I specify it in such a way that I know how to transform it into a running system, by skill and by automated tool support? This book gives a self-contained introduction to the modeling and development of business logic for enterprise systems."

In practice, the authors develop a couple of new technologies for the modelling of such forms. Page Diagrams are analagous to flow charts that show what a page does in terms of its interactions. From the home or Welcome page you can go register, go login, look at suggested books, do a search, etc. What links to what? What logic applies (bad password for instance, or is this user logged in). The page diagram is a way for the non-technical manager and the programmer to define exactly what a page or screen is supposed to do. It can become part of the specification that the programmer uses to produce what management wants.

The next concept the authors develop is the Form Storyboard. The storyboard shows pages with respect to the actions they cause in the server.

Other models such as information pages, and data interchange complete the description of the forms related system. For the most part, HTML based web sites are used as examples in this book. But the same kind of modelling is equally applicable to form/database related system such as accounting, payroll or other business applications.

Using the approach developed by these authors is the best way I've seen to document/specify/design a forms based interactive system.

The concepts and techniques in this book are inspiring. Instead of a list of rules, Forms that Work gives you a way of thinking that you can apply to any project, whether you are designing a new form, redesigning one (or taking it from paper to online), or evaluating the usability of a form.

The concept of looking at a form from the perspectives of how it is presented, and the relationship and conversation it creates is invaluable. Forms that Work made me see how all three of these aspects of a form have to work together to create a good user experience.

The writing is friendly and approachable, and the many examples make the concepts easy to understand.

You will never look at a form the same way again.

As a web analytics consultant I often need to dive into the world of Usability in order to see the big picture. Measuring shopping cart or sign-up form abandonment rates is only 'my' side of the story, trying to understand which checkout process are stopping a visitor from completing your form or process is the other half.

Caroline Jarrett's and Gerry Gaffney's book "Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability" gave me instant insights into the inner workings of forms. Using three layers of understanding "Relationship", "Conversation" and "Appearance" Caroline and Gerry explain in a very fluid style of writing how to design an effective form.

The books reads very easy, but don't be fooled. Even though it is not heavily filled with often worthless specialist jargon, it is filled to the brim with important definitions, visitor's perspectives, design techniques and case studies. Just like "Don't make me think" by Steve Krugg, this book is an utter joy to read! I highly recommend this for anyone wanting to get the most out of their online forms.