Developing User Interfaces - Ensuring Usability Through Product & Process - Deborah Hix ^ H. Rex Hartson - 1993 - Paperback - John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Developing User Interfaces
Ensuring Usability Through Product & Process

Programming / Software Design

"This book is an important milestone in our progress toward embracing user-centered design. This is the first book to emphasize process...[it] details a pragmatic approach to the interface development process in a way that is immediately useful to practitioners struggling to produce usable interfaces."
- James D. Foley, Georgia Tech

So you want to develop user interfaces for interactive systems? This practical book will show you how to do just that. Developing User Interfaces is about ensuring high usability through the user interface development process independently of widgets, software, toolkits, and implementation considerations.

The hands-on approach of this book uses practical exercises to apply the material presented with a suggested solution for each exercise. You will learn a quantitative approach to usability goals, usability evaluation, and management of the interface development process. Developing User Interfaces shows how to:

* Write a customized style guide and apply human factor guidelines to your interface designs
* Understand and know when to use currently available interaction styles in your interface designs
* Understand and apply the concept of an iterative life cycle for user interface development
* Use behavioral, user-centered representation techniques for capturing your interface designs
* Establish usability specifications to measure quantitatively the usability of your interface
* Build effective rapid prototypes of your interface designs
* Carry out formative usability evaluation as your interface evolves
* Perform cost/benefit and other analyses to determine which changes to the interface will have the biggest impact on usability

About the authors
DEBORAH MIX and H. REX HARTSON are
researchers and faculty members at Virginia Tech (VPI and SU), where they specialize in the design and development of user interfaces. Both have extensive consulting and training experience in human-computer interaction for a broad variety of organizations in business, industry, and government.