hey somebody ripped me off!

yes the written content is full of great information, and is highly acclaimed. However the vast majority of the images used in this book are nearly unreadable due to the extremely poor reproduction quality and low image resolution. This leads me to wonder whether the book was printed at kinkos or printed from the high school's 150 dpi printer!

i've seen photocopies that looked better than this! i'm not kidding!

come on.. black text on dark grey background?

were these conscious design decisions?

note... the 1 star is to bring down the average. i bought the book due to the perfect record of all 5 stars, however i don't believe a book on design topics should get away with such horrid imagery for the price..

2 of the 3 authors for this book are from xerox... i wouldn't doubt they used thier own xerox machine to reproduce the graphic designs found within the pages inside the cover.

If I would have been able to buy what basically amounts to a near comprehensive gathering of exactly the kind of research I've spent the past three years trying to find....I'd be a happer man with far more hair on my head.

Caveat: you gotta be the kind of person who likes reading this sort of thing. I love reading RFC's so its way up my alley. If you are looking for a Reader's Digest version of how to develop interfaces for complex systems you won't find it here.

But if you are one who seeks to augment your own personal toolbox with the findings of those far more wise than yourself, get out your wallet and buy this book. Its great.

Stuart Card, Jock Mackinlay, and Ben Shneiderman, all extraordinary leaders in creating and researching the field on human-computer interface design, have pooled their editorial judgment to create a comprehensive, and much-needed collection of pioneering articles on information visualization. They have produced remarkable survey of such topics as context, mapping, spatial metaphors, interaction, navigation, and visual tools.

680 pages! 47 articles! Filled with excellent choices of research and invention woven together with incisive summaries of the widely disparate, individual software accomplishments of the leaders of the field from around the world. This indispensable collection not only provides in-depth solutions to specific problems but also shows the explorer where the current frontiers are.

A rich, solid, impressive, and welcome contribution to a field that affects all of our lives now that the interactive graphic computer has made all of us users of visual language. Altogether indispensable for the researcher and innovator who will return to this remarkable collection again and again.

--Robert E. Horn, author, "Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century" and visiting scholar, Program on People, Computers and Design, The Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University.

This is more of a syllabus with references than an actual textbook. It's even a sensible syllabus; if you want an outline of the important topics in contemporary and historical computer user interfaces, Shneiderman's book will tell you what you need to know. But the utility of this book is unclear; it's not intended to teach the reader how to design interfaces, nor does it teach experimental design and evaluation.

At 600+ pages, it's both terse and verbose. Verbose, because of the "let me tell you what I'm going to tell you, tell you, tell you what I've told you" format favored in this kind of overview. Terse because the "tell you" part is a kind of white-washed summary; as soon as a topic is brought up, several references are trotted out, summarized in one or two lines, and then dismissed. I wanted more depth, more case studies, and a higher-level vantage point.

Despite a short tour of command lines, including natural language text commands, and a 10 page summary of speech recognition and synthesis-based interfaces, "Designing the User Interface" is almost exclusively about contemporary computer graphical user interface design. Better books on GUI design include Johnson's "GUI Bloopers" and Raskin's "The Humane Interface".

Overall it's a great book but the "Object-Action Model" proposed in the book lacks experimental results. May be he can considering include that in the next edition.

I have all three editions of Designing the User Interface and have used the principles described in them for years. This is that book that describes the 'three pillars of successful user-interface development' 1.) Guidelines Documents & Process, 2.) User Interface Software Tools, and 3.) Expert Reviews & Usability Testing. It also defines acceptance testing in terms of the user (time to learn specific functions, speed of task performance, rate of errors, retention of commands, subjective satisfaction). And provides the guiding principles for good user interface (e.g. direct manipulation). One of the most interesting areas covered is the information visualization strategy that implements dynamic visualization using direct manipulation. The mantra of 'overview, zoom and filter, then details on demand' should be wallpaper on the screens of software developers producing data presentation displays.

This book is about strategies for effective human-computer interface. It includes guidelines, but it's not a cookbook of things to do to get there. That these strategies and guidelines are not generally adopted and applied is evidenced by the many poor user interfaces currently available. (I once spent an incredible amount of time totally frustrated simply trying to move from the home page of one of the largest electronic manufacturers in Europe.)

This is a text book and its organization is biased toward academia, with many references to other works and a text book style. Each chapter ends with a researcher's agenda and practitioner's summary, but still practitioner's may complain that the book is too theoretical. To them I would comment that 'there is nothing so useful as a good theory', and check out [...] for examples of the results of applying the ideas in the book.

Ben Shneiderman is one of the legends of HCI and his work includes core principles for the discipline. This book is a must have for all serious students of human-computer interaction and provides an important foundation for developers of user interfaces.

A uniformly bland book. The author says in 11 chapters what could easily be said in a couple of paragraphs. And then, in the final chapter, he completely loses it and embarks on some sort of ridiculous diatribe against AI research. He displays an amazing degree of animosity towards those involved in this field of research, some of which he names personally. There are many far better books on usability available from Amazon.com, forget this one. What can I say, Leonardo would dismiss him as a fool.

Ben Shneiderman presents a refreshing view of 'the new computing' as an aid to enabling people to develop attributes similar to those he admires in Leonardo da Vinci. The Renaissance genius in painting & sculpture (and the related science of anatomy), engineering, and scientific thinking, is used as an inspiration for promoting more usable computers, universal design, and more useful technology.

The book is easy and refreshing reading. The first 5 chapters are of general interest, providing some historical background and setting the mood. The next five, which can each be read independently, relate to learning, business, health, government, and creativity, respectively. They can be read for education/enjoyment, or used as guidebooks for activists to push for the proper use of computers to help us achieve our goals. In fact, they encourage us all to become activists to help us exploit computers for our good.

There is a good list of references for those interested to pursue these ideas in more detail, and counter arguments from other sources help to present the ideas in a fair and considered manner.

I can recommend this as fine reading for anyone, from the inquisitive computer user, to the academic "expert", and particularly for the potential activist.

It is a sad fact that with the exception of deep academic and professional texts aimed at corporate programmers and computer science researchers, most books on computing have frighteningly short useful lifetimes. All too many of them are little more than glorified how-to guides in the use of specific versions of rapidly evolving commercial packages and ever changing industry standards. A few attempt to cover application areas in more generality, but very few indeed strike at the core of the really big picture while offering substantial value to both computing experts and End Users alike.

Ben Shneiderman's tour-de-force, Leonardo's Laptop, is just such a rare gem. It accomplishes the hat trick of meeting the needs of readers in academia, industry, and the general public by going beyond talk of the "in technologies" of the moment to conceptualizing a New Computing organized around the principle of putting human needs first.

It reminds us that while we may have become accustomed to buggy and brittle software, such bad designs - which cost both lives and dollars - impoverish the human spirit and need not be tolerated. By drawing on our scientific and artistic sides we can restore the balance to make technology use an ennobling experience.

Although the text is addressed to everyday computer users and decision makers whose purchasing patterns ultimately determine what the IT sector will produce, it offers a rich set of endnotes that will guide technically oriented readers to the resources they need to implement its vision. Moreover, researchers and business people will find Leonardo's Laptop to be an invaluable source of ideas for grant writing and business plan development.

This book is a must have that will lead to new insights with each reading.

If you are a High School Teacher or University Faculty Member whose students are looking at the role of computers in society or who aspire to creating the next generation of high tech, you owe it to them to evaluate Leonardo's Laptop for use as a required or recommended reading in your courses!