The essential interaction design guide, fully revised and updated for the mobile age About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, Fourth Editionis the latest update to the book that shaped and evolved the landscape of interaction design. This comprehensive guide takes the worldwide shift to smartphones and tablets into account. New information includes discussions on mobile apps, touch interfaces, screen size considerations, and more. The new full-color interior and unique layout better illustrate modern design concepts. The interaction design profession is blooming with the success of design-intensive companies, priming customers to expect "design" as a critical ingredient of marketplace success. Consumers have little tolerance for websites, apps, and devices that don't live up to their expectations, and the responding shift in business philosophy has become widespread. About Faceis the book that brought interaction design out of the research labs and into the everyday lexicon, and the updated Fourth Editioncontinues to lead the way with ideas and methods relevant to today's design practitioners and developers. Updated information includes: Contemporary interface, interaction, and product design methods Design for mobile platforms and consumer electronics State-of-the-art interface recommendations and up-to-date examples Updated Goal-Directed Design methodology Designers and developers looking to remain relevant through the current shift in consumer technology habits will find About Faceto be a comprehensive, essential resource.

About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design

According to Fitts' law, human movement can be modeled by analogy to the transmission of information. Fitts' popular model has been widely adopted in numerous research areas, including kinematics, human factors, and (recently) human-computer interaction (HCI). The present study provides a historical and theoretical context for the model, including an analysis of problems that have emerged through the systematic deviation of observations from predictions. Refinements to the model are described, including a formulation for the index of task difficulty that is claimed to be more theoretically sound than Fitts' original formulation. The model's utility in predicting the time to position a cursor and select a target is explored through a review of six Fitts' law studies employing devices such as the mouse, trackball, joystick, touchpad, helmet-mounted sight, and eye tracker. An analysis of the performance measures reveals tremendous inconsistencies, making across-study comparisons difficult. Sources of experimental variation are identified to reconcile these differences.

Fitts' law as a research and design tool in human-computer interaction

Introduction: Thinking Big Again 1. From Crisis Ideology to the Division of Innovative Labour 2. Technology, Innovation and Growth 3. Risk-Taking State: From 'De-risking' to 'Bring It On!' 4. The US Entrepreneurial State 5. The State behind the iPhone 6. Pushing vs. Nudging the Green Industrial Revolution 7. Wind and Solar Power: Government Success Stories and Technology in Crisis 8. Risks and Rewards: From Rotten Apples to Symbiotic Ecosystems 9. Socialization of Risk and Privatization of Rewards: Can the Entrepreneurial State Eat Its Cake Too? 10. Conclusion

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The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths

Gesture-Based interfaces offer an alternative to traditional keyboard, menu, and direct manipulation interfaces. The ability to specify objects, an operation, and additional parameters with a single intuitive gesture appeals to both novice and experienced users. Unfortunately, gesture-based interfaces have not been extensively researched, partly because they are difficult to create. This paper describes GRANDMA, a toolkit for rapidly adding gestures to direct manipulation interfaces. The trainable single-stroke gesture recognizer used by GRANDMA is also described.

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Specifying gestures by example

Perceptual visual quality metrics: A survey

Bill Buxton and I share a common belief that design leadership together with technical leadership drives innovation. Sketching, prototyping, and design are essential parts of the process we use to create new products. Bill Buxton brings design leadership and creativity to Microsoft. Through his thought-provoking personal examples he is inspiring others to better understand the role of design in their own companies--Bill Gates, Chairman, Microsoft"Informed design is essential." While it might seem that Bill Buxton is exaggerating or kidding with this bold assertion, neither is the case. In an impeccably argued and sumptuously illustrated book, design star Buxton convinces us that design simply must be integrated into the heart of business--Roger Martin, Dean, Rotman School of Management, University of TorontoDesign is explained, with the means and manner for successes and failures illuminated by engaging stories, true examples and personal anecdotes. In Sketching User Experiences, Bill Buxton clarifies the processes and skills of design from sketching to experience modeling, in a lively and informative style that is rich with stories and full of his own heart and enthusiasm. At the start we are lost in mountain snows and northern seas, but by the end we are equipped with a deep understanding of the tools of creative design.--Bill Moggridge, Cofounder of IDEO and author of Designing Interactions"Like any secret society, the design community has its strange rituals and initiation procedures. Bill opens up the mysteries of the magical process of design, taking us through a land in which story-telling, orange squeezers, the Wizard of Oz, I-pods, avalanche avoidance, bicycle suspension sketching, and faking it are all points on the design pilgrim's journey. There are lots of ideas and techniques in this book to feed good design and transform the way we think about creating useful stuff". -Peter GabrielI love this book. There are very few resources available that see across and through all of the disciplines involved in developing great experiences. This is complex stuff and Buxton's work is both informed and insightful. He shares the work in an intimate manner that engages the reader and you will find yourself nodding with agreement, and smiling at the poignant relevance of his examples.--Alistair Hamilton, Symbol Technologies, NYBooks that have proposed bringing design into HCI are aplenty, though books that propose bringing software in to Design less common. Nevertheless, Bill manages to skilfully steer a course between the excesses of the two approaches and offers something truly in-between. It could be a real boon to the innovation business by bringing the best of both worlds: design and HCI. --Richard Harper, Microsoft Research, CambridgeThere is almost a fervor in the way that new products, with their rich and dynamic interfaces, are being released to the public-typically promising to make lives easier, solve the most difficult of problems, and maybe even make the world a better place. The reality is that few survive, much less deliver on their promise. The folly? An absence of design, and an over-reliance on technology alone as the solution.We need design. But design as described here depends on different skillsets-each essential, but on their own, none sufficient. In this rich ecology, designers are faced with new challenges-challenges that build on, rather than replace, existing skills and practice. Sketching User Experiences approaches design and design thinking as something distinct that needs to be better understood-by both designers and the people with whom they need to work- in order to achieve success with new products and systems. So while the focus is on design, the approach is holistic. Hence, the book speaks to designers, usability specialists, the HCI community, product managers, and business executives. There is an emphasis on balancing the back-end concern with usability and engineering excellence (getting the design right) with an up-front investment in sketching and ideation (getting the right design). Overall, the objective is to build the notion of informed design: molding emerging technology into a form that serves our society and reflects its values. Grounded in both practice and scientific research, Bill Buxton's engaging work aims to spark the imagination while encouraging the use of new techniques, breathing new life into user experience design.. Covers sketching and early prototyping design methods suitable for dynamic product capabilities: cell phones that communicate with each other and other embedded systems, "smart" appliances, and things you only imagine in your dreams;. Thorough coverage of the design sketching method which helps easily build experience prototypes-without the effort of engineering prototypes which are difficult to abandon;. Reaches out to a range of designers, including user interface designers, industrial designers, software engineers, usability engineers, product managers, and others;. Full of case studies, examples, exercises, and projects, and access to video clips (www.mkp.com/sketching) that demonstrate the principles and methods.About the AuthorTrained as a musician, Bill Buxton began using computers over thirty years ago in his art. This early experience, both in the studio an on stage, helped develop a deep appreciation of both the positive and negative aspects of technology and its impact. This increasingly drew him into both design and research, with a very strong emphasis on interaction and the human aspects of technology. He first came to prominence for his work at the University of Toronto on digital musical instruments and the novel interfaces that they employed. This work in the late 70s gained the attention of Xerox PARC, where Buxton participated in pioneering work in collaborative work, interaction techniques and ubiquitous computing. He then went on to become Chief Scientist of SGI and Alias|Wavefront, where he had the opportunity to work with some of the top film makers and industrial designers in the world. He is now a principal researcher at Microsoft Corp., where he splits his time between research and helping make design a fundamental pillar of the corporate culture. * Covers sketching and early prototyping design methods suitable for dynamic product capabilities: cell phones that communicate with each other and other embedded systems, "smart" appliances, and things you only imagine in your dreams;* Thorough coverage of the design sketching method which helps easily build experience prototypes-without the effort of engineering prototypes which are difficult to abandon;* Reaches out to a range of designers, including user interface designers, industrial designers, software engineers, usability engineers, product managers, and others;* Full of case studies, examples, exercises, and projects, and access to video clips that demonstrate the principles and methods.

https://cds.cern.ch/record/1190758/files/9780123740373_TOC.pdf

Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design

Current practice in Human Computer Interaction as encouraged by educational institutes, academic review processes, and institutions with usability groups advocate usability evaluation as a critical part of every design process. This is for good reason: usability evaluation has a significant role to play when conditions warrant it. Yet evaluation can be ineffective and even harmful if naively done 'by rule' rather than 'by thought'. If done during early stage design, it can mute creative ideas that do not conform to current interface norms. If done to test radical innovations, the many interface issues that would likely arise from an immature technology can quash what could have been an inspired vision. If done to validate an academic prototype, it may incorrectly suggest a design's scientific worthiness rather than offer a meaningful critique of how it would be adopted and used in everyday practice. If done without regard to how cultures adopt technology over time, then today's reluctant reactions by users will forestall tomorrow's eager acceptance. The choice of evaluation methodology - if any - must arise from and be appropriate for the actual problem or research question under consideration.

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Usability evaluation considered harmful (some of the time)

Preamble Since the announcement of the iPhone, an especially large number of people have asked me about multi-touch. The reason is largely because they know that I have been involved in the topic for a number of years. The problem is, I can't take the time to give a detailed reply to each question. So I have done the next best thing (I hope). That is, start compiling my wouldbe answer in this document. The assumption is that ultimately it is less work to give one reasonable answer than many unsatisfactory ones.

Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved

We describe techniques for direct pen+touch input. We observe people's manual behaviors with physical paper and notebooks. These serve as the foundation for a prototype Microsoft Surface application, centered on note-taking and scrapbooking of materials. Based on our explorations we advocate a division of labor between pen and touch: the pen writes, touch manipulates, and the combination of pen + touch yields new tools. This articulates how our system interprets unimodal pen, unimodal touch, and multimodal pen+touch inputs, respectively. For example, the user can hold a photo and drag off with the pen to create and place a copy; hold a photo and cross it in a freeform path with the pen to slice it in two; or hold selected photos and tap one with the pen to staple them all together. Touch thus unifies object selection with mode switching of the pen, while the muscular tension of holding touch serves as the "glue" that phrases together all the inputs into a unitary multimodal gesture. This helps the UI designer to avoid encumbrances such as physical buttons, persistent modes, or widgets that detract from the user's focus on the workspace.

Bill Buxton

Papers

Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design

Usability evaluation considered harmful (some of the time)

Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved

Pen + touch = new tools

A comparison of input devices in elemental pointing and dragging tasks