General Description
Large book over 500 pages about user interface design. Consists of 12 chapters. It contains many images. No embedded code snippets. It is easy to read, but due to its size it isn’t very fast to go through. At the time of reading the third edition was current.
Brief Overview
Let me briefly outline the book’s content:
- Chapter 1 — Designing for People.
- Chapter 2 — Organizing Content: Information Architecture and Application Structure.
- Chapter 3 — Guiding the Journey: Navigation, Signposts, and Orientation.
- Chapter 4 — Organizing Elements on the Page.
- Chapter 5 — Visual Style and Aesthetics.
- Chapter 6 — Mobile Interfaces.
- Chapter 7 — Lists.
- Chapter 8 — Get to Work! Actions and Commands.
- Chapter 9 — Displaying Complex Data.
- Chapter 10 — Getting Data from Users: Forms and Controls.
- Chapter 11 — User‑Interface Systems and Atomic Design.
- Chapter 12 — Across the Screen.
Opinion
Decent book on UX and UI. Even though my notes for this book took only three pages, I can still list it as an active resource and recommend it to both novice front‑end developers and designers. Had I had more than ten years of development experience, my notes would probably have been much longer.
What stands out as an advantage, yet also a distinct feature of the book, is that the authors managed to classify and standardize the main components of user design and user behaviour patterns. Each pattern contains a clear list of:
- When to use it
- Why it’s needed
- How to implement it
- Examples of real‑world usage on sites and apps
The drawbacks of the book are that it is too large, while still being one of the few books that you can skim diagonally without losing the overall sense of a paragraph or chapter. The second downside is that, while behavioural patterns are thoroughly developed, not all UI elements are covered, and the ones that are included are presented in a chaotic order scattered throughout the book according to chapters. It might have been easier to group them exactly as they’re grouped in CSS/UI frameworks. However, that would likely have required a major rewrite of the chapters, and the essence the authors conveyed probably wouldn’t have been communicated in the same way.
