“User/System Interface Design”
Chapter in Encyclopedia of Information Systems: User/System Interface Design (4-Volume Set)
Hossein Bidgoli (Editor-in-Chief)
Academic Press, July, 2002
– Reprint (PDF)
– Book website
“A broad, comprehensive work spanning the whole of Information Systems, including some articles by experts in their respective fields.”
Dr. Peter Norvig, Director of Machine Learning, Google, Inc.“With numerous well written entries from a range of information science disciplines, the Encyclopedia of Information Systems is destined to find its place among the very best reference works of its kind.”
Professor James Castiglione, Brooklyn College, CUNY
The Elements of User Interface Design
Russian Translation
John Wiley & Sons, 2001
– View Russian translated book online
The Elements of User Interface Design
John Wiley and Sons, 1997
– Amazon.com
– Chapter 5: Golden Rules of User Interface Design (PDF)
– Book review – ACM (PDF)
– Book review – Core Competence
“I loved your book on UI design. I want you to know that your insights helped my company be successful. I spent (and spend) a great deal of time on the usability design of my products – primarily due to being influenced (and sensitized) by you.”
Bill Schafer, CEO, OrthoSpot“I recommend this book both as an excellent introduction to concepts and principles related to interfaces and as a low-key introduction to object orientation. It would be difficult to use as a textbook because it lacks exercises, but it would be valuable in both undergraduate and beginning graduate courses because Mandel clearly distinguishes users from developers, action-object from object-action styles of interaction, and object orientation from application orientation. These distinctions are likely to be among the most enduring and valuable information readers take with them.”
Dara Lee Howard, ACM Computing Reviews“Let me say your book ‘The Elements of the User Interface’ is fantastic. I own my own copy of it. My aspirations with regards to user interfaces are to one day go to graduate school to study and earn a degree in HCI and use that knowledge in private interface consulting.”
Aaron Bieberitz, Computer Science major, University of Wisconsin – Green Bay“As a software developer in the midst of a user interface design project, I carried this book coast to coast several times this summer, reading and re-reading portions of immediate relevance to discussions I’d had that day. Never was I disappointed. Rarely did I find a quick and easy ‘cook book’ answer, available for immediate but mindless application. Instead, I’d characterize this book as ‘food for thought,’ dishing out observations on man-machine interaction with generous dollops of seasoned insight.’
Lisa Phifer, Core Competence, Inc. (Complete review)“The best usability book I have ever read is ‘The Elements of User Interface Design’ by Theo Mandel, and I’m certainly glad I bought it when developing. It certainly doesn’t insult anyone by quoting usability laws without any sound practical basis. It gives you practical situations where tips on usability can be put into practice, and it then tells you the effects it has on users and why and gives examples of real applications. I like books like that. You can quote laws until you’re blue in the face, but ultimately they have to have a common sense effect.”
David Segendunum, Actuaria Co. (UK)
The GUI-OOUI War: The Designer’s Guide to Human-Computer Interfaces
Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994
– Amazon.com
Mandel was asked by Van Nostrand Reinhold to write this book after IBM switched publishers and went with QUE for the Object-Oriented Interface Design book.
“Possibly the single best overview to creating easy-to-use interfaces. Entertaining and complete. An absolute must for visual designers and programmers.”
Advanced Training Technologies SIG
OS/2 Magazine listed The GUI-OOUI War it in its hottest computer books for 1994. Bob Orfali, co-author of the bestseller The Essential Client/Server Survival Guide, wrote:
“A computer will never feel the same after you finish reading this fascinating book. Theo gives us a behind-the-scenes tour of the human-computer interface. You’ll discover that Windows 3.X is just the start. OS/2’s Workplace Shell is the next step. And the best is yet to come. This book can be read by anyone who uses a PC. Read it–it will change the way you think about your computer.”
OS/2 Professional magazine wrote:
“The GUI-OOUI War is a book that should be forced on every Windows and OS/2 developer working today…it will prove invaluable to software developers, and likely intriguing to curious users. If only half the rules in this book were followed, the quality of most programs would increase tenfold. If you want to know what makes an application interface successful or you want to make a good program great, there’s no better starting place.”
Object-Oriented Interface Design: IBM Common User Access Guidelines
IBM
(Mandel was a member of IBM CUA team that authored the book. Mandel also wrote the appendix on Multimedia.)
QUE Publishing, 1992
– Amazon.com
An industry “Bible” – the first Windows and OS/2 User Interface Style Guide. This book was shipped with every Windows and OS/2 developer’s kit. Dr. Mandel was a member of the IBM Common User Access (CUA) interface architecture team that researched, developed and wrote the first guidelines for Object-Oriented User Interface (OOUI) design. IBM’s OS/2 and Microsoft’s Windows first graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are based on this work. Dr. Mandel worked closely with IBM’s and Microsoft’s operating systems architecture team for a number of years on this critical industry guideline. Dr. Mandel also wrote the appendix on multimedia interfaces.
The book is a classic. It now sells on Amazon.com as a collectible item.