Review of Jennifer Tidwell’s Designing Interfaces, 2nd Edition

For the IDT 505 course, Foundations of Instructional Design and Web Authoring Environments, one of the three required texts was Designing Interfaces: A Primer by Jennifer Tidwell.
This second edition of the text is a tremendous resource for anyone that needs to put together interactive media learning products. There is a multitude of different ways to interact with learners, and the author broke them down into specific methods to address 14 different human development patterns. These patterns assume that people behave in predictable ways.
By following the directions provided in this book, it should be possible to remedy (or avoid) common multimedia design problems. This book includes detailed information on information architecture, navigation, layout, working with lists, commands, information graphics, form design, user controls, and style. Included throughout is information about designing for mobile applications, web applications, and social media, making this edition relatively up-to-date even though it is five years old. Within each of these categories, there are a number of different detailed solutions that are presented. Also, for each of the different patterns and methodologies, the author provides sound reasoning for the basics that the designer will need to know, or might need to explain to a client someday: “what,” “when,” “why,” and “how.”
There are more than enough full-color examples from real world media to bring home all of the points that were made in the book. This text will prove to be useful for instructional designers that are developing multimedia projects using methods or tasks that they have not tried before when. It can also be used as a reference in instances where justification or clarification is needed for the design choices that were made.
This book was a bargain, relatively speaking, coming in at under 30 bucks on Amazon, and it is one of the books from the program that I plan to keep after graduation.
Tidwell, J. (2010). Designing interfaces: A primer 2nd edition. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.