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是技術計算軟件廠商MathWorks公司的一名交互設計師和軟件工程師。她擅長設計和開發數據分析及可視化工具，最近正在為MATLAB 的數據工具進行新的設計。全世界有很多研究人員、學生和工程師使用MATLAB來開發汽車、飛機、蛋白質和宇宙理論等。她在網站設計方麵也很有名，很早的時候就是一名RIA（Rich Internet Application）技術的倡導者，並在2000年初協助設計和開發瞭Curl。

Jenifer在麻省理工學院接受技術教育，並在馬薩諸塞州藝術學院學習設計，但她一直沒有停止學習。她從1997年開始研究用戶界麵模式。 Jenifer熱愛攝影和寫作，並熱衷於在新英格蘭地區進行戶外活動――騎車、劃船、滑雪、攀岩。她的個人網站地址是http: //jtidwell.net。