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Designing the User Interface is written for students, researchers, designers, managers, and evaluators of interactive systems. It presents a broad survey of how to develop high-quality user interfaces for interactive systems. Readers with backgrounds in computer science, psychology, sociology, industrial engineering, information science/studies/systems, business, education, and communications should all find fresh and valuable material. Our goals are to encourage greater attention to usability issues and to promote further scientific study of human-computer interaction, including the rapidly emerging topic of social media participation.

Since the publication of the first four editions of this book in 1986, 1992, 1998, and 2005, HCI practitioners and researchers have grown more numerous and influential. The quality of interfaces has improved greatly, while the community of users and its diversity have grown dramatically. Researchers and designers could claim success, but today user expectations are higher, applications are more demanding, and platforms are more varied. In addition to desktop computers, designers now must accommodate web-based services and an increasingly diverse set of mobile devices. User interface designers are moving in new directions: some innovators provoke us with virtual and augmented realities, whereas others offer alluring scenarios for ubiquitous computing, embedded devices, and tangible user interfaces. These innovations are important, but much work remains to be done to improve the experiences of novice and expert users who still struggle with too many frustrations. These problems must be resolved if we …