STC UUX Community Newsletter
Usability Interface

Book Review:
Designing Interactions
by Bill Moggridge

Reviewed by Alice Preston

It's a book. No wait, it’s a website. No wait, it’s a book with a website and a DVD. It weighs almost 5 pounds. My legs are going to sleep. What is this?

This book has clearly been a labor of love for designer Bill Moggridge, one of the founders of the design firm IDEO. Strangely, one of the online reviews of this book stated that Moggridge was trying to hide his association and sell the book as something that it's not. I didn't find that to be the case; instead, the author is quite upfront about his connection with IDEO both on the website and in the book. In fact, the website includes a link to IDEO. What's IDEO? A design consulting company with offices in California, London, and other places around the world. General manager Tom Kelley has recently been publishing books about their take on creativity, design and usability techniques, and here’s cofounder Bill Moggridge now chiming in. This book might mention IDEO a few more times than I would like, but in fact many of the things it's discussing happened elsewhere.

Over the last five years, perhaps longer, Bill Moggridge has been conducting interviews with just about everyone who was involved in shaping our interaction with technology. The book covers interviews with more than 40 designers, from those who helped design the Star graphical user interface, to the Google guys, to those involved in envisioning the future. Even when one knows enough to argue with certain of his claims (for example, Bill claims to have coined the term “interaction design,” but perhaps he and Alan Cooper had some kind of psychic link), it's a fascinating trip.

For those of us with insatiable curiosity about how people use things, this book is pretty interesting. Do you want to know the story of how the mouse was invented—and reinvented? It’s in here. How about what came first and what came later in terms of handheld devices? Toys? Games (video games that is)? Or maybe it's the Sims? How is the use of technology different in the Far East than it is in the Western world? What's going on in tangible interfaces, sound, and wearable interfaces?

But for those of us in the STC with an interest in usability, there are some other aspects of this book that are pretty interesting, too. Not only does the book discuss different aspects of usability, from the early practices at Apple and Xerox Parc, to photos of the first laptop in use in space, to current user observation techniques. But even the layout of this book is pretty interesting. Each section consists of several interviews, with each presented as a “module”. A module might include a photo and blurb about the interviewee in a nice two-page spread, followed by a very carefully crafted discussion with information from the interview and illustrated with beautifully chosen photographs.

Now, if you wanted to treat this as a coffee table book, you could just go through and find those beautiful spreads about each interviewee, and you'd have just about enough information to know what's in the book. (However if you're reading the book cover to cover, you'll find that there's quite a bit of repetition between the intro and the segment that follows about the interview.)

You say you're not a reader? Well, I find that a little hard to believe but let's assume it's possible. You could put in the DVD, and if you have the right software on your computer (Quicktime will do it, or the VLC media player, for example), you'll be able to listen to an edited version of the interview, sometimes illustrated with some of those same beautiful photographs. As an alternative, just go to the website for the book, and not only are there tabs for discussions about the interviews and even short clips from each interview (or a lot of them), but there is also a PDF of one whole chapter, if you'd rather download and read it that way. There's also a comments page, in case you're inclined to submit some feedback. I suspect the website was up before the book was actually in print, judging from the dates of some of the comments on the comments page.