ISBN9780470018668

It was somehow helpful to understand on some topics.
However, Interaction Design is kind of subjective topic.
Hence, I think this book is quite good on giving some examples to make a clear point.

I think this book is a must-read, essential of the introduction to HCI.
It covers all the important aspects of interaction design with an important and coherent message--user-centeredness for design. It is not a mere collection of the elements that need to be learned in HCI. The authors emphasize the importance of user-centeredness in interaction design, and exhaustively and thoughtfully integrate all the knowledge that is essential to this approach in the field of HCI.
I would strongly recommend this book to any serious instructors for HCI who like to teach the state-of-art directions and approaches in user-centered interaction design in HCI with covering all the important concepts founded in cognitive psychology, software development and design methods, and various user study techniques to be used in interaction design.

So, I bought this book "Interaction Design, 2nd Edition" by Sharp, Rogers and Preece, and I thought maybe the world is interested in my two cents. So here it goes ;-)

Despite the fact that the authors use a lot of words in order to explain even the simplest facts, the book is written concisely and presents a clearly understandable train of thought that leads from the very first introductory page to the very last reference page. The authors start out by giving small introductions to every chapter, explaining what is covered on the following pages. A large amount of boxes with extra information and "comments" help to deepen the insight of the covered material. Many pictures, drawings and graphs visualize very abstract sections and a (very) short summary after each chapter is of great value when you would like to freshen up what you have read earlier. The book's layout clearly is geared towards students, as it incorporates many colored boxes and pictures, without, however, being inconsistent. This makes it possible to skim through the book and look up some information without reading through entire sections. Experts in Human-Computer Interaction might wish for a lower amount of examples to bring a point across and would like the authors to have focused on the details a little more. Also, the fact that the authors make a lot of inline citations gives rise to the impression that they only repeat other's ideas. Yet, in fact, the book incorporates a fair amount of the authors' research (as one can easily see in the references), which is presented most modestly.

The book is literally on interaction design, NOT usability testing and NOT on other HCI methodology. If one is interested in that, I would strongly recommend Kuniavsky (2003) and Rubin (1994). If you are interested in interaction design and the principles that lead to a good user experience, this book is for you. Especially novices in ID will appreciate the level of detail, the amount of examples and extra information and the thorough explanations. Experts will find this book helpful and invaluable, yet sometimes a little wordy.

Congratulations for the 2nd edition. Now everything fits in its proper place and the chapter sequence makes sense and gradually takes you from the basics of intercative systems design to design methodologies and evaluation. No more jumping around to achieve a logical subject sequence that we had to do with the 1st edition. Of course, I will keep using it as the main reference book in my lectures on User Centred Design.

This is probably one of the worst books of any kind that I have ever encountered. It is hands down the worst "textbook" I've ever read. It reads like a fourteen year old's freshman research paper, both in the quality of content, diction, sentence structure, and grammar. It brings the concept of "filler" text to a level unprecedented by anything I've ever come across. Page after pager after page of nonsensical filler text occasionally interrupted by an actual concept, which of course is reiterated in ten different ways over three paragraphs.

To be fair, there are a handful of informative ideas in this book, but in total they could probably be outlined in an eloquent ten page summary; this of course, would be difficult to sell for $70. And it's not just that this book was written for the layman, it isn't appropriate for any skill level. It simply repeats the same idea over and over again, for six hundred plus grueling pages. This can be summed up in this brilliant general life statement: "There are many ways to do this and the way you do this will depend on lots of things, like what you have, what you can do, and what you want." This paraphrased sentence was stated at least ten times in every single chapter (and believe me, this is not hyperbole). What's more, this statement is slightly more eloquent then what you'll come across in the actual book.

But what's most alarming is that this book has critical acclaim. It appears that it's used in quite a few HCI programs across the country. I, for one, was assigned this book in a graduate level class at Brown; and it being the basis of the class, led to one of the least informative classes I've ever been apart of.