Designing with the Mind in Mind: Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Guidelines

by Jeff Johnson PhD

Overview

User interface (UI) design rules and guidelines, developed by early HCI gurus and recognized throughout the field, were based on cognitive psychology (study of mental processes such as problem solving, memory, and language), and early practitioners were well informed of its tenets. But today practitioners with backgrounds in cognitive psychology are a minority, as user interface designers and developers enter the field from a wide array of disciplines. HCI practitioners today have enough experience in UI design that they have been exposed to UI design rules, but it is essential that they understand the psychological basis behind the rules in order to effectively apply them. In Designing with the Mind in Mind, best-selling author Jeff Johnson provides designers with just enough background in perceptual and cognitive psychology that UI design guidelines make intuitive sense rather than being just a list of rules to follow.

• Provides an essential source for user interface design rules and how, when, and why to apply them
• Arms designers with the science behind each design rule, allowing them to make informed decisions in projects, and to explain those decisions to others
• Equips readers with the knowledge to make educated tradeoffs between competing rules, project deadlines, and budget pressures
• Completely updated and revised, including additional coverage in such areas as persuasion, cognitive economics and decision making, emotions, trust, habit formation, and speech UIs

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780128182031
Publisher:	Elsevier Science
Publication date:	08/14/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	125 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Jeff Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco. He is also a principal at Wiser Usability, a consultancy focused on elder usability. After earning B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale and Stanford, he worked as a UI designer, implementer, manager, usability tester, and researcher at Cromemco, Xerox, US West, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun. He has taught at Stanford, Mills, and the University of Canterbury. He is a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy and a recipient of SIGCHI's Lifetime Achievement in Practice Award. He has authored articles on a variety of topics in HCI, as well as the books GUI Bloopers (1st and 2nd eds.), Web Bloopers, Designing with the Mind in Mind (1st and 2nd eds.), Conceptual Models: Core to Good Design (with Austin Henderson), and Designing User Interfaces for an Aging Population (with Kate Finn).

Table of Contents

1. Our Perception is Biased 2. Our Vision is Optimized to See Structure 3. We Seek and Use Visual Structure 4. Our Color Vision is Limited 5. Our Peripheral Vision is Poor 6. Reading is Unnatural 7. Our Attention is Limited; Our Memory is Imperfect 8. Limits on Attention Shape Our Thought and Action 9. Recognition is Easy; Recall is Hard 10. Learning from Experience and Performing Learned Actions are Easy; Problem Solving and Calculation are Hard 11. Many Factors Affect Learning 12. Human Decision-Making is Rarely Rational 13. Our Hand-Eye Coordination Follows Laws 14. We Have Time Requirements

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Making sense of the psychology behind design rules, so your designs make sense

Editorial Reviews

"The clear writing style, comprehensive coverage of common design decisions, and the reference to human psychology that provide the theoretical support for these decisions make it a solid addition to your personal or professional library." —User Experience Magazine, 2014

"Even if you are working for many years in the field of UX, it is worth reading this book…you learn a lot of interesting background information that can help one to question existing rules, to consider their own experiences and to establish well-founded decisions." —UsabilityBlog.de, July 10, 2014.

"...easy and captivating reading, something not commonly encountered in a nonfiction work on an important subject…software developers and anyone else who may be concerned with designing good user interfaces should read this book." —ComputingReviews.com, Aug 28, 2014.

"…the authors provide an excellent selection of topics and examples that constitutes necessary knowledge for everyone involved in designing user interfaces, and perhaps even all software engineers…The book is easy to read for novice audiences, students and particularly practitioners. It is well illustrated with plenty of examples." —HCI International News, May 2014

"…guide to user interface design based on the science of human perception and memory. Each chapter focus on a particular limiting aspect of the human mind, including priming or experience bias in our perceptions, looking for visual structure, poor quality of color and peripheral vision, the high cognitive load of reading…" —ProtoView.com, April 2014

"What's really good about the book is that Johnson provides ample details about the topic, but doesn't reduce it to so just a set of rules or mind-numbing (and thusly unreadable) checklists. His synopsis of the topics provides the reader with a broad understanding of the topic and what they need to do in order to ensure effective UI design is executed." —SlashDot.org, April 28, 2014

"In this valuable traversal of human cognition, Jeff Johnson illuminates its operation and exposes everyday fallacies and misunderstandings through examples and explanations. The results provide a useful education for everyone, but one that is essential for designers. If you are curious about the human mind, you will enjoy this book: if you are a designer, you need it." —Don Norman, Nielsen Norman group and Author of Design of Everyday Things, revised and expanded edition

"Need to know about how things really work in the mind of your users? Designing with the Mind in Mind is a treasure trove, packed with insightful information about the cognitive pitfalls, perceptual glitches, and usability errors that plague user interfaces. DWTMIM is a book every designer needs to read, if only to understand why your brilliant user experience might not actually work in reality, and what brain science suggests you do about fixing it." —Dan Russell, Senior Research Scientist, Search Quality, Google

"Several excellent books ago, Jeff Johnson figured out that the way to reveal user interface design is to emphasize concrete examples. This book is organized around 14 fundamental and wide-ranging insights about human psychology that are vividly grounded and applied in design examples. The book will be useful to professionals who can quickly inform or remind themselves of how user interface design guidelines work, and it will engage and equip students entering this exciting area." —John M. Carroll, Distinguished Professor of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University

From the Publisher