Alan Cooper's About Face is one of those pillars of UI/UX design, the reading of which is a rite of passage. I figured few books would be more appropriate as a capstone to my long list of design-oriented reads. It is nearly an institution in and of itself. Last night I turned the final page and ticked a pretty big 560-page book off of my reading list.
There was enough material in this book that I adopted a new habit of using small post-its to mark important passages. This was helpful not only in referring back to earlier material in the book, but also in cementing some of the concepts in my head. This practice was so useful I've started doing it with other books too.
You may have noticed that the post-its don't really kick in until about 2/5 of the way through the book (Chapter 10 to be specific). I'll be honest and admit that the first nine chapters felt like a rehash to me. That's not to say they are without value, but they are a bit long-winded and, at times, excruciating in detail.
So let me go ahead and get my beefs with the book out of the way. If you guessed that a book on its third edition that is nearly three inches thick would have some opinions you would be right. I don't have a problem with opinions—that's why I bought the book. But I did find the tone a bit much. Haughty, imperious, self-righteous and overbearing might be good descriptions too. There is a definite Moses-coming-down-from-the-mountain-with-fresh-tablets feel to this book. Mr. Cooper and his cohorts are here to set you straight. Don't let it turn you off. Think of these guys as that cranky-but-humorous guy you work with. He's a riot as long as you don't take what he says too seriously.
Secondly this is a long book. I'm not convinced it really needed to be this long. There's an awful lot of repetition spread throughout the chapters. All of that is nit-picking really. This was an incredibly informative book. Again, the number of stickies you see should give you some idea of the value that I got from it. There is a lot a person can learn here.
A big part of Cooper's philosophy is the focus on Goal-Oriented Design. The first part of the book spends a significant amount of ink describing the concepts of personas, goals and user research. As a developer I couldn't help but feel that a lot of this was . "Just let the arch-priests of interaction design get it all working and then hand it off to the developers", they say. Hmmm, my experience tells me otherwise. To be fair, the authors attempt to address in the afterword of the book. But still...
Once goal-oriented design is out of the way, the book picks up significantly by covering such concepts as the "excise" (tax) that systems place on humans, how people get into "flow" and how bad software can remove them from it or prevent it. One of my favorite little gems is a discussion of possible vs. probable. While it's possible that a user may want to choose one option over another, in cases where one option is disproportionately chosen over the other (the probable) use a default with an override. Think of how many times you've had to answer the same question over and over. It's pretty irritating, no?
Another great section is the discussion of metaphor. Of the book's numerous examples, the ones demonstrating bad metaphor really shine. General Magic's Magic Cap interface is an absolute nightmare of conflicting messages and unnecessary navigation. What do these icons mean? If I rub the lamp do I get three wishes? If I push the rubber stamp am I getting notarized or checking out a book? Just what the hell is going on here?
Cooper describes Magic Cap's failure as an over-reliance on global metaphor, where the system is essentially trapped in its slavish adherence to its metaphor. The rubber-stamp is there because real desks have rubber-stamps. But the need to be consistent with the desk metaphor weakens the interaction.
Cooper proposes idiomatic design as the alternative to metaphors. User interfaces have been around long enough that a large number of interactions have already been figured out. Users are already familiar with them and, generally, don't require additional ramp-up to recognize them. Obviously there are a lot of bad idioms out there too so, like anything in life, take that advice with some degree of moderation.
If there's one over-arching theme to the book it's that there are basically three groups of users you have to consider: beginners, intermediates and advanced users. The first and last groups are usually the smallest with the bulk of your user population consisting of perpetual intermediates. Beginners generally graduate quickly to intermediates. From there it's a much larger jump to advanced users. However, a lot of interfaces are often geared towards beginners. I would suspect (with little evidence to back this up) that a lot of this has to do with too much focus on customer-acquisition.
Without a means for potential intermediate users to shed their training wheels, users can get quickly frustrated. However you can't build a power-user-only application either. Very few users run the gauntlet from beginner all the way to the advanced user. So the trick to is spend the correct amount of effort on features that match the proportions on your users.
With this idea in mind the final eleven chapters of the book provide a fantastic, detailed look at how the principles described above apply to common visual idioms. For example, in the chapter devoted to menuing systems, the authors describe not as the sole interface, but a "pedagogic vector" for beginners. When combined with shortcut keys and accelerators, menus provide a way for beginners to graduate to intermediates and beyond.
Another important theme in the last section is just how far software really needs to come to meet users. The authors review example after example of "computer-first" design where the user seems be treated as a necessary irritant. One of my favorite passages in the entire book is on the topic of wizards: "Programmers like wizards because they get to treat users as peripheral devices."
Another chapter is devoted just to disk storage and how most of our idioms around disk storage should really be the computer's problem, not the users. At first this kind of talk seems like the crazy guy in Hyde Park, but after some reflection I think he's right. There is an awful lot of software that couldn't care less about the user. We can do better than this. We should do better than this.
One technical detail of the book that I just love is how they integrate images with captions. A particular pet peeve of mine is when images and captions seemed to be dropped into the text in willy-nilly fashion with little regard to the reader's flow. When figures that are referred to in the text aren't placed close to the text, I have to context switch and try not to lose my place. I either have to remember to look at the figure soon, or I have to switch to the figure immediately and then find my place back in the text. It drives me nuts. Whoever did the layout for About Face 3 obviously thought about the usability of the text. God bless you, whoever you may be.
While I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't want to have to talk to any of these guys at cocktail party (I doubt I'd get a word in edge-wise), they put together an incredibly informative book. I'm pretty sure I'll need those sticky notes in the future to revisit a number of concepts presented here.
5 out 5 stars.