Why are there no "standard texts" on designing software interfaces? (or tell me I'm wrong?)
If you want to learn to *build* software, there are excellent and complete texts on the subject. It's not just a tech-vs-art thing: there are standard texts on type, drawing, color, etc.
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Of course, there are lots of great books peripheral to (and useful for learning) the topic of software interface design: Inmates…, Design of Everyday Things, Tufte, etc. But these don't aspire to be complete introductory guides to the subject, like How to Design Programs.
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Some close contenders:
* About Face: great coverage of broader design product process, but concrete details on interface design quite limited
* Don't Make Me Think: focused on web sites and info arch, not much discussion of interactive interfaces
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* Designing the User Interface: huge breadth of coverage, but surprisingly little detail about how to actually go about designing a user interface, concretely; academic perspective feels disconnected from actual industry practices
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Some theories:
* "You can't teach that in a book." It's probably not the ideal medium, but I don't buy the argument. c.f. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Elements of Typographic Style, Gradus ad Parnassum, Interaction of Color, etc
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* "It's too new to have a good book." a) Not really: you could write a good book about the concepts in the 1984 Macintosh interface. b) Even if you insist on starting from the multi-touch era: there are already outstanding books about, say, deep learning.
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* "Writing a canonical book wouldn't be valued by that culture (socially, economically, etc)." Maybe… but even if you believe "most designers don't read much," they sure value audiovisual media. Where's the 3blue1brown / minutephysics / vihart of interface design?
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* "All the knowledge is locked up in golden handcuffs and NDAs. It's all in the Apple HI people who've been there for 20 years." Partially true, but not enough. Four of the best interface designers I knew at Apple left since in the past eight years.
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* "Why write a book like this when you could spend your time actually designing interfaces and earning $X00k/yr?" A fair question, but it also applies to e.g. programming texts, and there are tons of canonical works there.
Replying to
one of my college profs wrote this book, you may find it useful / interesting. "TASK-CENTERED USER INTERFACE DESIGN": hcibib.org/tcuid/tcuid.pdf
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Ah. Sure, room for more depth, but still a great staring point. And free.
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Replying to @jbrancha
You're right. I've forgotten how explanatory the original was. Better in many ways than the others I listed. Still not really sufficient, I think—it's meant to present guidelines, not to be a comprehensive instructional text. But underrated!
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fwiw, I'd love to read one from you teamed up with an amazing interface designer. I imagine you won't make time to write something like that (opportunity cost), but still.
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Thanks, Chris. Probably not, unless it's part of some weird media project, but it's fun to think about. Maybe someday I'll know enough about designing interfaces to feel like this is a reasonable thing to attempt.
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I think it’s there’s a perception that the design of interfaces is largely trend-driven or that they rely on platform specific tropes (ie ios7 “flat”, material, or metro (rip)), I don’t think anyone wants to end up with “designing killer vb6 apps”. I agree it’s shortsighted tho
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Another: The "it depends" factor.
It's noticeable for me having spent a decade designing enterprise software for big consumer tech co's and living the culture clash. But it doesn't explain why we don't have books on interface design for more niche domains.
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