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July 22, 2003
Designing From Both Sides of the Screen
It's a shame that John at WebWord gave "Designing from Both Sides of the Screen" such a bad review. Here's his take in a nutshell:
"The book could have been much, much better if it was only about instant messenger usability. That would have been the perfect niche to fill."
The point of the book clearly was to cover the design and development process from both an interaction designer's and a programmer's point of view. That it's about the design and development of an IM client is really beside the point.
I've seen exactly no books that discuss usability issues or interaction design from the perspective of the coder. Although I think the attitude that interaction design should happen totally apart from programming concerns isn't as strong as it used to be, it's still around. Frankly, I don't know enough about systems architecture, working with protocols, or code-level restrictions, and so books like this are far more helpful to me than a book on IM usability would have been.
Posted by Andrew at July 22, 2003 07:55 AM