Designing a good interface isn't easy. Users demand software that is well-behaved, good-looking, and easy to use. Your clients or managers demand originality and a short time to market. Your UI technology -- Web applications, desktop software, even mobile devices - may give you the tools you need, but little guidance on how to use them well. UI designers over the years have refined the art of interface design, evolving many best practices and reusable ideas. If you learn these, and understand why the best user interfaces work so well, you too can design engaging and usable interfaces with less guesswork and more confidence. "Designing Interfaces" captures those best practices as design patterns - solutions to common design problems, tailored to the situation at hand. Each pattern contains practical advice that you can put to use immediately, plus a variety of examples illustrated in full color. You'll get recommendations, design alternatives, and warnings on when not to use them. Each chapter's introduction describes key design concepts that are often misunderstood, such as affordances, visual hierarchy, navigational distance, and the use of color. These give you a deeper understanding of why the patterns work, and how to apply them with more insight. A book can't design an interface for you - no foolproof design process is given here - but "Designing Interfaces" does give you concrete ideas that you can mix and recombine as you see fit. Experienced designers can use it as a sourcebook of ideas. Novice designers will find a roadmap to the world of interface and interaction design, with enough guidance to start using these patterns immediately.

Jenifer Tidwell是技术计算软件厂商MathWorks公司的一名交互设计师和软件工程师。她擅长设计和开发数据分析及可视化工具，最近正在为MATLAB 的数据工具进行新的设计。全世界有很多研究人员、学生和工程师使用MATLAB来开发汽车、飞机、蛋白质和宇宙理论等。她在网站设计方面也很有名，很早的时候就是一名RIA（Rich Internet Application）技术的倡导者，并在2000年初协助设计和开发了Curl。

Jenifer在麻省理工学院接受技术教育，并在马萨诸塞州艺术学院学习设计，但她一直没有停止学习。她从1997年开始研究用户界面模式。 Jenifer热爱摄影和写作，并热衷于在新英格兰地区进行户外活动――骑车、划船、滑雪、攀岩。她的个人网站地址是http: //jtidwell.net。