Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Interface Design Patterns

If you haven’t checked out Safari Online Bookshelves, it’s definitely worth a look – hundreds (thousands?) of technical books online and readable from cover to cover. I’m in love.

I’ve also been reading an absolutely fascinating book on designing interfaces (called, surprisingly enough, Designing Interfaces, by Jennifer Tidwell). Even you don’t do this sort of thing for a living, it’s a really interesting look at how we approach new software or new objects that we have to interact with (from ATMs to programming your cellphone). It talks about how we use familiar gestures to interact with new objects (well, there was button like this on my last phone, so this must do the same thing!) to how our expectations of how things behave impacts our choices.

Yeah, my geek-o-meter is clicking wildly, but I love this sort of thing.

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