Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design

By Jenifer Tidwell, Charles Brewer and Aynne Valencia

Designing good application interfaces isn’t easy now that companies need to create compelling, seamless user experiences across an exploding number of channels, screens, and contexts. In this updated third edition, you’ll learn how to navigate through the maze of design options. By capturing UI best practices as design patterns, this best-selling book provides solutions to common design problems.

You’ll learn patterns for mobile apps, web applications, and desktop software. Each pattern contains full-color examples and practical design advice you can apply immediately. Experienced designers can use this guide as an idea sourcebook, and novices will find a road map to the world of interface and interaction design.

• Understand your users before you start designing
• Build your software’s structure so it makes sense to users
• Design components to help users complete tasks on any device
• Learn how to promote wayfinding in your software
• Place elements to guide users to information and functions
• Learn how visual design can make or break product usability
• Display complex data with artful visualizations

• Language: English
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781492051930

Jenifer Tidwell

Jenifer Tidwell has been designing and building user interfaces for industry for more than a decade. She has been researching user interface patterns since 1997, and designing and building complex applications and web interfaces since 1991.

Reviews for Designing Interfaces

[boris_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Totally awesome book on user interface design.Easy to absorb information, presented in beautiful way.What I liked about the book is that it does not cover the very basic stuff that is usually obvious, but dives deeply into the principles of good UI design.

[pivo1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book gives a broad tour of various interface elements and principles of interaction design. Discussions cover both software graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and web interfaces. Among other things, Tidwell covers many mechanisms in detail using patterns, which are a way of representing a prototypical solution to commonly encountered design problems. This book contains hands-on information and is well-suited for practitioners.

[davekong_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is a UI design version of the OOP design patterns book by Erich Gamma, et al. The book is beautifully laid out and contains a ton of detailed screen shots (as a book about visual ui design should be). Like Erich's book, this one can be read as a reference book that talks about the "what", "use when", "why" and "how" of each design pattern.Although seemingly complete with over 94 "patterns", I felt this is a bit overwhelming. While most patterns are commonly known UI controls/constructs (e.g. breadcrumb, property sheet, tree table), features (e.g. multi-level undo, skins, preview) and concepts (responsive disclosure, good defaults), there are other minor/obvious items that I felt should not be called "patterns" (e.g. escape hatch, liquid layout).The goal of a good "patterns" book should be to discuss as few patterns as possible that covers the vast majority 80-90% of the problem space. Erich's book had about two dozen patterns which well covers the world of the object-oriented programming. This book, 94! Some "patterns" dubiously overlap each other not just by a little: escape hatch, cancel-ability, forgiveness, undo... They are all the same thing to me.I felt this book would have been so much better if the author could have taken more time to distill the "patterns" down to fewer core ones and talk about each a little more in depth. Alternatively, just talk about purely visual controls and leave feature/concepts out of the picture. "Completeness" is not always a good thing.

[murdocke23 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Great reference that collects common interface patterns for different types of interface issues.