Excellent historical overview of how the practice and industry of interaction design came to be.

Also has varied and interesting interviews with both pioneers and everyday practioneers in several different fields.

Moggridge does a good job of tying all the interviews and ideas together into a smooth narrative flow.

Highly recommended, interesting read. Great value for the money, even when you don't consider the included DVD of interview snipplets.

Downside: Has an IDEO-bias and that's not too unexpected.

Somehow I didn't pick up on this until I actualy paged through the book physically -- this isn't just about website or multimedia. It's about anything that has a human interface, including laptop computers. (Unfortunately, Amazon pairs it with many Internet/website design books, adding to my confusion.)

Because it seems to cover the whole range of interface use and recent history, I didn't really go farther into the book to review it.

I just got the book for a week, read half of it. it's quite interesting to know something happens in the last 30 years, the author come up with interviewing the guy who made these things happen, let the guys explain their thoughts on the cases, this make the book interesting and helpful.

It's a pity that the book go too fast for each case, when you want to know more details, it stops. Anyway, this book seems dosent want to serve as something try to reach this goal. so this is not the weakness of the book.

Most important thing, when reading it , you'll get the interesting pieces. And it guide you to walk along the colorful road in the IxD forest. This is really cool book.

Something make it not so nice. To thick to put into the bag.

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It's easy to get carried away with the claims that Moggride's book is an instant classic. But I'd have to agree, this book would be worth paying more than $100 for. The book carries its wisdom well, and now sits on my work bookshelf for constant reference. I will use this while planning for and conducting user experience based products. This book does concentrate more in the field of software development, however the lessons translate well into general product design. As such I'd recommend this book to any designer who is interested in improving their user centred products.

It's a great volume at a great price. The content is very approachable and readable, almost like a coffee table book to introduce the power and effect of great user experience and interaction design to non industry folk. Its a classic in the same league as books by Norman and by Papanek. The DVD shows that this book was well thought with the same craft as other Ideo products. I also recommend the book "Art of Innovation" which talks about Ideo specifically and the practices they use.

As the internet is still young and rapidly growing in diverse directions, I'm always looking out for books like this, that give a perspective on how things actually started and who were the persons involved in the early stages. It just shows you, that what we consider a "normal" interface or application today is based on the ideas of a few people, real pioneers for their field. And it gives you an idea on how future interfaces might look like. Not the full 5 stars, as the narrative approach turns out to deliver long passages that I would consider a bit too personal and contain little information on the subject.

Designing Interactions is very well written and well thought out. Bill has compiled a history of interactions design which also serves as an example of what works and why. And of course, you can't beat the price...a hard cover book for under $30...wow!

(I originally gave this book a more positive review. Amazon won't let me change the star rating. I give this book TWO stars, not four.)

This book is fairly impressive at first glance. Seven-hundred plus pages, adequately footnoted, and nicely designed. I can't imagine anyone in the field of interaction design not enjoying cracking open Moggridge's book.

But "Designing Interactions" isn't quite what I thought it would be, and my first optimistic impressions were terribly wrong. It is, as Bruce Sterling's blurb describes it, "a labor of love." It's really "The History of Designing Interactions." More specifically, it's "The History of how Bill Moggridge, his company IDEO, and A Few Other People Mostly in California Designed Interactions." It's something of a hagiography--biographies of designer-saints, whose every effort was nothing less than beautiful, innovative, useable and useful. Failures, missteps, or significant-but-ugly designs (Windows 3.1 gets about a sentence) are minimized. That makes it feel like something of a whitewash.

It actually reminds me a lot of "The Art of Unix Programming" in its combination of cultural and technological history, mixed with practical sections. But where the people in "The Art of Unix Programming" come across as modest smart people, sort of tinkering along inventing an entire paradigm, Moggridge's subjects are sort of bathed in this golden California glow of eternal optimistic technophilia; it's not that the design of buttons and menus isn't a moral, cultural, and aesthetic imperative (cause it is), but in Moggridge's text it just all feels a little...inevitable. It's also historically dubious. Moggridge doesn't use interviews well, and they seem to be basically his only research here. Relying on the memories of his old design buddies is an extraordinarily sloppy way to write history. Other evidence for claims and facts is sadly lacking. Readers need to bring a very skeptical eye to the content here.

It's also depressingly full of IDEO work, IDEO employees, and IDEO methods. Which would almost be ok if Moggridge were more transparent about his own role as founder and current senior employee of that company. As it is, the conflict of interest here is a pretty crass. (After all, Moggridge stands to personally and professionally benefit from defining "interaction design" entirely around his own business, right?)

But I think if you do this kind of work, you'll enjoy the histories of the mouse, the menu, or the Palm Pilot, and seeing lots of sketches and diagrams and screenshots. It *is* kind of cool to see stuff like Bill Atkinson's sketches of the Apple Lisa. It also feels quite current, and there are good sections on mobile devices, patterns of technology adoption, play, service design, critical design, and ubiquitous computation. Though the downside of this breadth is that the whole thing feels like a grab bag approach. There are more than a few genuinely disappointing parts: the chapter on the internet is pretty poor, basically equating "the Internet" with Google and a couple of long-gone fancy web navigation experiments. It's a chapter that's little more than a Silicon Valley courtier's homage to the boy kings Larry and Sergey. What's this doing in a book on interaction design, Bill?

It's interesting to compare "Designing Interactions" with Dan Saffer's new book with a slightly different title: "Designing for Interaction." Both books use interviews, but Saffer's are short sidebars, Moggridge's book is *mostly* interviews. Though Moggridge's last chapter is a practical section, about the length of Saffer's whole book, Saffer *still* manages to cover a lot more of the nuts and bolts, day to day work of interaction design.

I made the mistake of opening the Amazon box yesterday. It contained Bill Moggridge's brand new 766 page book Designing Interactions. I have several talks to prepare and a bunch of other stuff to do, but I forgot all about them once I started reading the book. Bill has been at ground zero of the design thinking movement for 30+ years, starting has own industrial engineering firm years and then joined David Kelley, Mike Nuttall to form IDEO, as what was then the first full service design firm, and has now broadened to become an innovation firm that helps companies develop innovative products, processes, customer experiences and organizational designs. I've known Bill for about a decade and have always been touched by both his grace and brilliance, and range of skills -- and they are all on display in this beautiful book. Bill is perhaps best known as the designer of the Grid, the first laptop computer in 1981, but that is just one of the many, many designs he has contributed to.

This book --using interviews with many of the most influential and important people and their stories in the product design and innovation world over the past 30 years or so -- demonstrates what design thinking is and how great people do it. Read it, studying it, talk about it. I've read a lot of books on creativity and design, I've try to study it, teach it, apply it myself, but while there is a lot of good stuff out there, this is the masterpiece, the top of the pops.

If you are going to read one book on how to do creative work in the real world, this is it. The 700 images, the stories, the writing are all relentlessly beautiful and instructive.

Not only that, the process that Bill used to create the book also is an example of the design thinking and action at its best -- the process and the product demonstrate why Bill is known as one of the most skilled designers in the world (and I mean both technically and socially skilled). I had heard about the book a bit from Bill, as I was amazed to hear that he was -- with help from key people at IDEO and his social network -- producing everything in the book himself, writing all the words, doing all the interviews with 40 or so designers and innovators who are the main focus of the book -- everyone from Doug Englebart (inventor of the computer mouse) to Google's Larry Page to Wil Wright (creator of the Sims), to designing the layout and cover, to using desktop publishing and video editing software to himself to bring it all together. In fact, I confess that although I have made it through the text, I haven't even looked at the DVD yet that is included with the book, and as I've implied, Bill also produced.

In the name of full disclosure, I am an IDEO Fellow and have known and admired Bill for along time. But I know and admire lots of people who write books on creativity and innovation. This is the masterpiece in my view. This book is published by MIT Press -- which has had few of any books at the top of the best-seller list in its history -- and it is about 500 pages longer than most books that are slated to be hit sellers. But it deserves to be a best seller given the current clamoring for creativity and innovation throughout the world. Designing Interactions only costs $26.37 on Amazon -- and it has more useful information and inspiration than any 10 other books you are likely to buy that are vaguely related to the subject -- and they don't have a DVD.

Now I have to go back to my other chores and resist the temptation to watch the DVD for another couple days. It is 100 minutes!

P.S. Checkout the Designing Interactions Website -- you can see video clips from the DVD there and read a sample chapter. The URL is http://www.designinginteractions.com/