Designing from Both Sides of the Screen: How Designers and Engineers can Collaborate to Build Cooperative Technology by Ellen Isaacs, Alan Walendowski, New Riders Publishing, 2002, ISBN , 336pp
In recent years, a number of excellent books on web and application usability have been published. Titles such as Software for Use [Constantine & Lockwood, 1999], GUI Bloopers [Johnson, 2000] and Usability Engineering [Nielsen, 1993] are excellent sources of UI design guidelines, but have little to say regarding the relationship between UI design and software engineering. The authors of Designing from Both Sides of the Screen, Ellen Isaacs and Alan Walendowski, represent both sides of this equation - the former is an interaction designer, the latter is a software engineer. Throughout the book's main case study, the development of an instant messaging application, conversations between the two authors are used to illustrate the ways in which the sometimes-conflicting forces of interface design and technical reality are resolved.
That said, the book is more concerned with UI design issues than technical ones. Isaacs begins by espousing some general guidelines for UI design and providing real world examples of devices, web sites and applications that violate these guidelines. The general thrust of these guidelines is to respect the physical and mental effort of the user - a state characterized as being like a butler -helpful but not intrusive, anticipatory but not presumptuous, in short - collaborative.
With these general principles as background, we are then introduced to the book's main case study - the development of an instant messaging application called Hubbub. The Hubbub client runs on both the Palm platform and the PC. This requirement presents a number of UI and technical challenges throughout the development effort, and provides many opportunities for Isaacs to illustrate how to make intelligent compromises based on the principles she has formerly introduced - as well as giving the reader some insight into the limitations of mobile platforms. The usage-centered design process the book recommends begins with assembling a prioritized list of user tasks, organizing those tasks into display units, create a task flow diagram, walk through the tasks.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the development process illustrated is the iterative phase that comes after the first usable release of Hubbub is made. This iterative phase incorporates a usage study - and readers without direct experience in this form of gathering feedback will be interested to see an example of the way feedback and observed use from real users can be used to modify a product in light of difficulties encountered.
Designing from Both Sides of the Screen makes an excellent overview to usage-centered design, and illustrates a practical process for the development of user interfaces and their subsequent refinement through usage study. It also provides a rare coverage of the difficulty in resolving the differences of opinion that frequently occur between UI specialists and software engineers.