Developing User Interfaces

by Dan R. Olsen and Olsen

Book Overview

In the early days of computing, technicians in white coats controlled refrigerator-sized computers housed in sealed rooms, far from ordinary users. Today, computers are inexpensive commodities, like... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1558604189
• ISBN13: 9781558604186
• Release Date: July 1998
• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
• Length: 414 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Best book on how user interfaces actually work

A great book for computer scientists that need to know how user interfaces work from top to bottom, including basic graphics, widgets, interactor trees, and event models. In fact, it's the only book I know of on the subject, as most of it was scattered throughout dozens of research papers. The first chapter is also a pretty good introduction on the need for good user interfaces.

Not funny enough

I took an undergraduate user interface class from Dr. Olsen. May have even got an A in it. He has a good sense of humor in real life. I think the book would be better if it incorporated more of his personality. The book is well written and will help you understand how to develop user interfaces (as the title implies). I enjoyed reading it and still refer back to it from time to time. It's not an advanced book (nor is it a "for dummies" book), but it gives you a foundation for understanding topics like computer graphics, design patterns (in particular MVC), and graphics toolkits like Swing. It has added to the collection of skills that helped me get my current job, so how can I not love it?

A useful text for computer scientists

Most existing UI/HCI books ignore the details on how to implement user interfaces and are thus inappropriate for courses in many computer science departments. Olsen's book steps into this vacuum and provides a text that covers how to go about determining the tasks an interface should support as well as how to implement the resulting design. The bulk of the book is on the implementation side and thus students will also come to understand how toolkits, which practitioners generally use, work internally.This text can be used in a quarter long course on UI development or in a more comprehensive semester long HCI course when supplemented with additional material on human abilities, design, and evaluation. We have found this book quite valuable in three offerings of our course on UI Design, Prototyping, and Evaluation here in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley.