Comments about O'Reilly Media Designing Interfaces:

This book considers and gives practical, useful advice on designing practical, useful interfaces to websites, web and desktop applications, mobile apps and so on, covering what the author refers to as 'interface idioms' - different styles and types of interface and giving clear direction on how users interact with them.

The patterns themselves are broken down into the what, where used, why and how the patterns are used - each section followed by great, clear screenshots with commentary on the good and bad of each design.

New sections in this edition include integrating social media into your site or app, and also looking at patterns for designing for the mobile web.

The section for mobile I found particularly interesting - it gave a comprehensive range of design patterns appropriate to mobile websites and apps, which gave me some really useful information for a new project.

Overall, a fascinating read, one you can dip into as necessary. Highly recommended

Comments about O'Reilly Media Designing Interfaces:

Everyone had faced unusable programs. The biggest part of the unusable programs are caused by unusable interfaces. In my experience, one of the most difficult things a developer faces is the designing of good interfaces. Usually, the people whom will have to use the program are not developers and, in any case, no one likes to be slowed down by the counter-intuitive interface.

This book speaks exactly about this: designing intuitive and easy to use interfaces, as the title suggests. Part of this book is based on the idea (idea that I agree with) that exist recurring patterns in the graphic interfaces that, if used, can be recognized by the users speeding up their learning curve of the new program. The book, along with a lot of other things, explains these patterns telling to the reader when and how to use them. The author uses a chapter speaking about the very important topic (my2cc) of the visual hierarchy.

The author does not provide any 'ultimate solution', but she does show all the ingredients for the graphics interfaces, letting to the programmer the task of finding the best option for his specific needs. I think that this is very important for the quality of the book, the author, in fact, does not have the presumption of owning all the solutions, but she limits herself in describing all the components letting the reader to cook his idea.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Designing Interfaces:

The Application marketplace is getting competitive and "First Impression Is the Last Impression" is increasingly the scenario, especially when people are looking at several applications. Given that context, it is extremely important to get the User Experience as people would expect it. Jenifer Tidwell has done a great job by collecting together a list of User Interface Design Patterns. The author has classified them in different areas like navigatation, page organization, complex data representation, input forms and much more. In each of these areas, the book gives you an overview of different patterns, good and bad examples via screenshots so that you can immediately understand the point. I particularly liked that the book has chapters now on Social Media and Mobile Design Patterns. If you are planning on taking your existing website to a mobile world, go through the patterns here. This book is ideally positioned towards experienced developers and they will be able to appreciate the points more because they would have experienced it when releasing several applications and/or on receiving customer feedback about the user experience. Having said, it can be a good reference even in an educational environment. If you are working with a team of developers, the collection here is well suited for your team to understand and be on the same page when it comes to delivering the user experience. A good checklist of things to look for while developing your user experience. I recommend this book if you are serious about getting the user experience right.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Designing Interfaces:

Patterns are present within IT industry for quite some time. Typically, books related to patterns application refer to particular language and present patterns either using either the language they refer to or using UML. Jenifer takes a different approach. Instead of providing reader with technology specific solution she shows how different UI related aspects can be organized and turned into reusable patterns. In first chapter, you will find description of various motives that drives users. This is the entry point or the rest of the book. How to react correctly to user's requirements (expectations) is a leading motive of the book. Next chapters focuses on various aspects of UI design (e.g. navigating, retrieving user's input, presenting data, listing data). What is worth mentioning here is that Jenifer doesn't bind solutions to a particular technology or operating system. She tries to diversify and cover most common user environments. Of course, she shows examples that are based on real applications but these are used rather as an example instead of being one and only proper solution.

What I like in the book is the way Jenifer presents the patterns. She goes with them, one by one, using structured schema: what will be covered by particular pattern, when is it used, why is it used, how should you use it, how does it look like (by example), and the reference to other sources. In general, this is good book, however I think that some conclusions are not solidly proven. On the other hand, particular UI efficiency is not something that you can easily prove

Comments about O'Reilly Media Designing Interfaces:

Developers: It's time to meet the user interface! This book describes interaction patterns for building successful, engaging user interfaces in a practical, didactic way for software developers. It offers a collection of recommended patterns for building attractive, powerful user interfaces which improves the usability and the user experience.This is a collection of interaction patterns known by the usability engineers but unknown for software engineers and developers. Each pattern is associated with the purpose of an entire user interface (UI), its visual components and the actions it must support. In this way, a developer responsible of the presentation layer of an application reduces the probabilities of using incorrect user controls and bad windows arrangements that leads to errors, fatigue and annoyance.Moreover, a highly usable product increases the rate of return of investment that a company invests for the development of such a product. With this book you'll learn the key elements that distinguish broadly accepted products like Adobe's and Apple's products. That's because many products coincide on their functionality, however, the usability and user experience (UX) makes the difference.What I liked most were the speech and the illustrations of each interaction pattern, so I didn't fell tired, on the contrary each time more motivated. I think this is a good starting point for entering in the world of good user interfaces without a lot of formal usability theory.Note: This review was in exchange of the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program ([@])

Comments about O'Reilly Media Designing Interfaces:

'Designing Interfaces' by Jenifer Tidwell is a wonderful collection of user interface design patterns. The UI patterns that have endured and the new ones that have come in recently with social media, RIA etc, are detailed. This book is in second edition and has new chapters for social media and mobile devices. Some chapters have been reorganized compared to first edition and few 'obvious' patterns have been removed. The patterns in this book cover following problem areas : * organizing content, * navigation, * organizing a page, * lists, * actions and commands, * user input * displaying complex data * social media * mobile devices & * visual aestheticsEach pattern has below sections : what, use when, why, how, examplesScreenshots are provided wherever required. The pros and cons are also discussed. The language and style is simple. The explanations clearly illustrate the in-depth knowledge of the author.In my opinion, this is a great book for UX designers and UI designers. A good reference book for all. I liked the section on UI design for mobile devices. That approach is new to me and I found it interesting.What I did not like in this book is the content organization. Side bars could have been used. Not sure if this is a problem due to the book being in epub format and not paper, reading is a bit difficult. The links to patterns in introductory chapters require a little bit of to & fro motion. Content organization should be done for easy read. I would suggest this book for intermediate to advanced level and not beginners.I reviewed this book as a part of Oreilly's Blogger Review Program. In exchange for my honest opinion on the book, I receive an electronic copy of the book at no charge. If you are a "see it to believe it" type of person, checkout the preview of this book in Oreilly's web page of this book.