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About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design: Essentials of Window Interface Design Paperback – 11 Aug. 1995

by Alan Cooper (Author)
3.4 out of 5 stars 9 ratings
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The cleverest code in the world is worth nothing if a program′s interface proves an unwieldy barrier to users. That′s why programmers and designers alike will benefit from About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design. Here, respected software designer Alan Cooper shares his own real–world experience and design principles so that you, too, can fashion intuitive, effective user interfaces. Applicable to multimedia and Web sites as well as application software, About Face is an invaluable resource for design professionals.
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  1. ISBN-10
    1568843224
  2. ISBN-13
    978-1568843223
  3. Publisher
    John Wiley & Sons
  4. Publication date
    11 Aug. 1995
  5. Language
    English
  6. Dimensions
    19.05 x 3.68 x 23.52 cm
  7. Print length
    580 pages
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About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design
About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design
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From the Back Cover

About Face The Essentials of User Interface Design Cooper Interaction Design Dear Reader, This book has a simple premise: if achieving the user's goals is the basis of our user interface design, then the user will be satisfied and happy. If the user is happy, he will gladly pay us money, and then we will be successful. To those who are intrigued by the technology which includes most of us programmer types we share a strong tendency to think in terms of functions and features. This is only natural, since this is how we build software: function by function. The problem is that this isn't how users want to use software. Developers are frequently frustrated by this, because it requires us to think in an unfamiliar way. But after the initial strangeness wears off, goal–directed design is a boon it is a powerful tool for answering the most important questions that crop up during the design phase:
  • What should be the form of the program?
  • How will the user interact with the program?
  • How can the program's functions be most effectively organized?
  • How will the program introduce itself to first–time users?
  • How can the program put an understandable and controllable face on technology?
  • How can the program deal with problems?
  • How will the program help infrequent users become more expert?
  • How can the program provide sufficient depth for expert users?In About Face, you'll explore new ways to look at what you work with every day, learning how to create workable designs in the real world, on a real deadline, inside a real budget. Sincerely, Alan Cooper President Cooper Interaction Design "Alan Cooper is the Miss Manners' of software design My advice is to buy two copies autograph the second and send it to an engineer at Microsoft." Paul Saffo, Director, Institute for the Future "About Face defines a new interface design vocabulary that speaks to programmers in their own terms. We have come a long way from the time when there were just modal (bad) and modeless (good) interfaces, and this book reflects that progress." Charles Simonyi, Chief Architect, Microsoft Corp.

About the Author

About the Author Alan Cooper is one of the most respected software designers of our time. He is the winner of the Microsoft Windows Pioneer Award for his work in designing Visual Basic. He is also one of the most outspoken critics of how the software industry goes about building the interface between products and people. His thirteen–year–old software design consulting company, Cooper Interaction Design, is based in Palo Alto, CA.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ John Wiley & Sons (11 Aug. 1995)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 580 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1568843224
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1568843223
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 19.05 x 3.68 x 23.52 cm
  • Customer reviews:
    3.4 out of 5 stars 9 ratings

About the author

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Alan Cooper

Alan Cooper

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For over 30 years, Alan Cooper has been a pioneer of the modern computing era. His groundbreaking work in software design and construction has influenced a generation of programmers and business people alike and helped a generation of users embrace interaction design. He is best known as the "Father of Visual Basic" and is the founder of Cooper, a leading interaction design consultancy.

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Top reviews from United Kingdom

  • B. Ashley
    5.0 out of 5 stars Astounding...
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 October 2002
    "You would not take a visitor to your house in to another room just to shake their hand". So points out the author of "About Face", an excellent resource for intuitive interface design. Before I read this book, I was working as a software engineer and interface design normally fell in to the lap of the designers who's job it was to make it "look and feel" good, but was rarely intuitive.
    The book covers things you probably already knew (read "common sense"), but one doesn't skip these points, as they serve as a gentle reminder. Other parts of the book make you go "Of *course*". Again, common sense.
    Just some points covered are:
    * How to make your interface intuitive
    * How to avoid bad mistakes (presented by example)
    * Consistency
    I recommend this book to anybody who is involved in some way (however remote) with interface design. It is clearly written, and humerous in places.
    As mentioned on the back... buy two copies. Keep one for yourself and send the other to Microsoft.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Laakso Karri-Pekka
    5.0 out of 5 stars The most important book written about UI design so far
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 June 2005
    Cooper's first book is still his best one, much better than the "upgraded" About Face 2.0. His ideas were revolutionary back in 1995, and most of them are still waiting to be taken into use in the software industry.
    However, this book's main benefit is not about how to *do* UI design but rather the attitude: why do UI design, what's wrong with the current UIs etc. The attitude is 100% correct and sadly missing from most of the textbooks about UI design. Cooper gives out his ideas about what should be fixed in most cases without a solution and he doesn't justify them properly, but even pointing out the problems has more value than approximately 5 standard UI design textbooks put together.
    In the middle of the book there is a large amount (~ 100 pages) of rather boring interaction detail advice that you should probably just glance through, but for example chapters 13, 27, 28 and 34 are pure diamond - you should probably buy the book just to read them. I completely stand with the relevancy rating of the chapters my wife Sari put in the web already back in 1999, and I won't repeat it here: just type in "lukuohje about face" in Google to find it.
    In summary, my advice is that if you decide to read just one book about UI design, read this one and forget Nielsen, Shneiderman, Norman and others. If you understand the attitude and ideas, it will change your life: you can never look at UI design in the way you did before.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • rich@kde.org
    2.0 out of 5 stars A disappointing book
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 December 1999
    I bought this book because of the high recomendations it has had and I was very disappointed. There is little in it that isn't covered much better elsewhere. Cooper presents most of his information without providing any real justification, and ignores entirely the much more difficult issues of how to implement his suggestions. Add to this that most of the information can be found in any decent UI design text book and the book looses most of it's appeal.
    This book seems to be aimed at people who want to complain that the UI of a program is no good, rather than at helping those of us who are writing UIs do it better.
    The book also contains a number of errors and suggestions that if a little thought is applied turn out to be ludicrous. Buy 'The design of everyday things' instead it is a much better book.
    8 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

  • Brian Curtis
    3.0 out of 5 stars Still a landmark, but we've moved on since then
    Reviewed in the United States on 5 November 2003
    Verified Purchase
    I've long been curious about this book because it is so often cited and hailed by current usability experts as the "starting point of software usability." And maybe it was a groundbreaking work in 1995, when hardcore coders and "power users" still made up the majority of the user base. But now, many of Cooper's claims and proposals seem awkward or downright unusuable... the antithesis of what usability now stands for.
    To be fair, this is an old book (in the IT sense of the word), and a new "About Face 2.0" is apparently hitting the shelves soon. Thank goodness! A lot of the ideas presented in the original are timeless and important, but others have hopefully been relegated to the dumpster.
    Goal-directed design, for example, is something that interface designers should never lose sight of. Cooper does an excellent job of digging up the real goals of users (as distinct from their job descriptions) and maintaining focus on how to satisfy those goals while balancing them with other realistic business concerns-profit, professionalism, efficiency, and so forth. He decries the "real world analogy" trap that so many developers fall into and stresses the limits of "metaphors" in promoting user understanding. He stresses the importance of visual feedback for all actions and the need to protect users from "modes."
    This is all good material that developers and project teams should always keep handy for the inevitable design arguments. (Although note that the tone of this book is relentlessly programmer-focused, hailing from a time when all "design" was done by coders, and interface or usability specialists simply didn't have a place in IT.)
    But when Cooper gets into suggestions for "breaking the mold" and coming up with new and different types of interfaces, he loses me. He seems to vastly overestimate the readiness of users to learn new interface features and new designs. More recent comments from other usability sources acknowledge this basic truth. Joel Spolsky, for example, states that "An interface is well designed when it works exactly the way the user expects it would." Steve Krug states it even more baldly as "Don't make me think!" Don't make me think about the PROGRAM, that is; users are very willing to think about their tasks, they just refuse to waste time learning your cool new interface for what is (to them) just a complicated and badly-designed tool.
    Cooper makes sweeping suggestions, such as doing away with file structures and directories entirely, or increasing the reliance on "chord clicking" and triple-clicking for key functions (for power users only, of course). He wants more icons and less text because of space considerations, even though he acknowledges that icons are inherently confusing to new users (idioms-something that can be learned only through experience) and are often poorly executed.
    He also introduces several new concepts to the platform, such as a "milestones" feature in word processing. These new notions may perform valuable functions, but at what cost? Their suggested implmentation is awkward and confusing; the terms themselves are hard for non-coders to understand. Do we really want all dialog boxes to have an additional button: "OK, Cancel, Abandon"? It seems that, in his enthusiasm for trying something new and different, he temporarily forgets his own caveat: "No matter how cool your interface, less would be better."
    I'm glad that a new version of this book has been developed; hopefully it has retained the core principles and jettisoned the specific examples, particularly the "totally new and different!" ideas. For better or worse, we have a standard for software interfaces now; changes must be approached with caution and delicacy, no matter how much of an improvement they seem to offer. Today's user base won't waste time learning a new interface and doesn't care how "cool" or even valuable it is. Don't forget the focus on user goals-and their goal will never be "learning to use this great new software."
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  • John Wismar
    5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best GUI books I've read. A must read.
    Reviewed in the United States on 2 January 2001
    Verified Purchase
    Cooper, who is an experienced UI designer when he's not writing books, has written an excellent one here. "About Face" has a great deal of meat, namely Cooper's ideas about how to make programs easier to use for people who are NOT developers.
    About the only weak point I saw is that the book was written in 1995, and many of the software titles he uses as examples have since been updated, in some cases more than once. On the other hand, if you are able to overlook the dated examples while reading the book, you can often look at the revised versions of the software to see how the problems he mentions have been corrected. (I think that some UI people in at least one very large, Seattle-area software company read have read this book and applied some of the ideas.)
    Many of his ideas are controversial, and any number of them have never, to the best of my knowledge, been implemented, but they all flow from a common basis of "How could this be made easier." And when Cooper explains his ideas, they make sense.
    I would love to see a revised and expanded Second Edition, but until that comes out, this book is at the top of my list to be read by people who develop UIs.
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  • Lawrence J. Winkler
    2.0 out of 5 stars Short on concrete, ***********
    Reviewed in the United States on 26 May 2001
    Verified Purchase
    Its been some time since I read this book, but my lasting impression is that it is not very useful -- it's a 400 page ad for hiring him as a consultant -- based on promises alone.
    He describes writing a UI design document based, not on roles people play (not directly), but inventing "real" people with concrete skills and characteristics, imbedding stock photo in the document to make the "person" more real. Good idea to enhance UI Use Case type documents.
    But the book contains no examples. Only abstract statements. What does a good UI document look like? How detailed should it be?
    I contacted him via email to obtain so concrete examples. He refused claiming his examples are owned by his clients. I responded suggesting simplification to remove identifying info or he (or I) getting permission from the client for some limited access. No response.
    Is he for real? Does he have concrete examples? Prove it!! Or is he just blowing smoke.
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  • K. Tsang
    3.0 out of 5 stars good to know information
    Reviewed in the United States on 27 September 2010
    Verified Purchase
    although information is years old now, it serves its purpose to showcase what a beginner like me should know.
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  • R. Smith
    5.0 out of 5 stars Great insights distilled into a book
    Reviewed in the United States on 9 October 1998
    Verified Purchase
    I've been using computers for over a quarter century, so I've seen a pretty broad range of user interfaces. Cooper realizes that a computer must be a tool, and that good tools simply do a job and make it clear to the operator just what was done. They -don't- get in the way just to make things easier for the programmer. Cooper talks about how to build good computer based tools, the "features" that get in users' way as well as the sorts of features that help users get their jobs done. This is how you write software that generates fanatical loyalty in its user community. It solves -their- problems, even if it makes the programmer's task a bit harder.
    Cooper makes the controversial assertion that error messages often just cover up situations the programmers didn't want to bother with. I've seen variants of this principle hold true in data communications and in robotics, where you don't have a human operator to bail you out. Cooper is right. I hope someday all GUI developers are held to Cooper's standards.
    Rick Smith.
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