User interface design: bridging the gap

A cursory visit to the computing section of your local bookshop will reveal an odd omission in the literature of human-computer interaction. We are well supplied with texts discussing the "front end" activities of requirements gathering, such as task analysis, use cases, scenarios, and a variety of other techniques for discovering and describing user requirements. Equally, there is a plenitude of books on the "back end" activities, such as the design and layout of screens and controls for a variety of implementation environments. (Indeed, it is hard to believe that the world needs quite so many books on Web site design; on the other hand, the evidence of the Web itself suggests that few of these books are in the hands of Web site designers.) There are also many well-defined processes for evaluating the usability of an interface once it has been designed, even when it is just a lowfidelity paper prototype. One step in the design process, however, has been oddly neglected: the step that transforms user requirements into an initial interface design (which can then be refined through established techniques). This is the "gap" of this book's subtitle.