Additional Bibliographic material. See also the additional references page.

Books

The following is a list of books that I have found useful.

Designing the User Interface. Ben Schneiderman. 3rd Edition. Addison-Wesley 1998

One of the classics. This book is aimed at everyone who is involved in the design of user interfaces. It is not a "how to program them guide"

Designing Object oriented User Interfaces. Dave Collins. Benjamin Cummings 1994.

This book adopts a particular paradigm, the object oriented view. It provides the reader with a conceptual framework for designing user interfaces. There is some discussion of implementation details.

A Small matter of Programming: Perspectives on End user Computing. Bonnie A. Nardi. MIT Press 1993

It is hard to classify this book. It has some very good things to say about what the business of programming is really about. Spreadsheets and CAD systems are used as examples of powerful environments in which users are prepared to learn sophisticated methods.

Windows Wisdom. Leendert Ammeraal. John Wiley 1993.

Some of the nuts and bolts of windows programming are examined. The book does not try to do everything. Rather it builds gradually to a complete system. It give an understanding of why Windows programs are the way they are.

Core Java. Gary Cornell and Cay S. Horstmann. Prentice-Hall.

I think I prefer this book to java by example because it is a little more systematic. In particular it is written for people who know something about programming. Of course if you like to start out with all the deatils there is:

Java in a nutshell: David Flanagan O'Reilly and Associates.

The books in this series are reliable if somewhat dry. This one has all the classes and their listed. (Of course if you get Symantic's Cafe you won't need this since everything is on line for browsing. Is this a good interface?)

Tcl and the Tk Toolkit. John K. Ousterhout. Addison-Wesley. 1994.

If you want to build quick graphic interfaces in the X world this book tells you how. Simple programs can be put together very quickly.

Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. George Lakoff. Univ of Chicago press. 1987.

A summary of modern views about categorization.

User Interface Management Systems: Models and Algorithms. Dan R. Olsen Jr. Morgan Kauffman

Written before the explosion of Visual languages and therefor somewhat out of date this book provides a good guide to lower level details on system structuring.

The Design of Everyday Things. Donald Norman Doubleday. 1990

This is a must read book. It explains why so many things are easy to use and so many others are not.

The Invisible Computer. Donald Norman. MIT Press.

Even better than the Design of Everyday Things. Norman is opinionated -- mostly right too! -- about the way in which the computer industry has failed almost completely to take account of the user in software design.

The Humane Interface. Jef Raskin. Addison-Wesley 2000

Written by one of the designers of the McIntosh interface. This is a book that I might have used for this course if I had seen it earlier. Again I don't agree with all he says -- I think he is quite wrong on the one button mouse issue, for a left hander needing to use both the mouse and a key on the left hand side of the keyboard is design sadism.

JAVA. Look and Feel Design Guidelines Sun Microsystems Inc.

This is a style manual for applciations that use the Java foundation classes. There are many good things in it. Personally I don't like their rejection of the use of the middle button of a three button mouse, chording (for a two button mouse and click+key would work for the other mice) until sanity prevails and everybody uses three button mice -- OK this is the M*cr*s*ft way but even that Bill is right occasionally.

Magazines and Articles

IEEE Computer

Published by the IEEE this monthly frequently has material of interest to GUI designers. The March 1995 issue has several articles on Visual programming.

IEEE Software

A quarterly. Also published by the IEEE.

Communications of the ACM

Published Monthly by the ACM (formerly known as the Association for Computing Machinery). This also often has articles relevant to user interface design. The ACM now publishes a journal on user interface design.

• See for example the August 2000 issue which is devoted to "personalization".
• The July 2000 issue has some articles on "Physically based computer animation". While perhaps not directly related to GUI design there are some useful insights to be gained.

intelligence

Published by SIGART the Special Interest group on AI of the ACM has occasional articles of interest for User Interface design.

• Interface Agents as Surrogate users by Robert St. Amant appears in the Summer 2000 issue