Dan Saffer deserves to be congratulated on producing an excellent in-depth introduction to the topic of Interaction Design.

I've put off purchasing this book for a while as there was only one other review of this book on Amazon.co.uk for ages, that gave no idea of what ground was covered or what value the book offered. I then recently saw the book listed in Smashing Magazines' 'Top 10' for great web/usability/design books, and bought it on the strength of this review.

I have not been disappointed, and this is now one of my favourite design books, as it works well both as a well written overview of the topic, as well as a useful source of reference if you are starting to work on either an interactive product or digital (or both) project.

Chapter headings include:

Ch1: What is Interaction Design?
Ch2: Starting Points
Ch3: Interaction Design Basics
Ch4: Design Research & Brainstorming
Ch5: The Craft of Interaction Design
Ch6: Interface Design Basics
Ch7: Smart Applications & Clever Devices
Ch8: Service Design
Ch9: The Future of Interaction Design
Epilogue: Designing for Good

The text is well written, with excellent supporting illustrations, photos and diagrams that complement the clearly explained text throughout. The book is well structured and each chapter builds well on the preceding topic.

One feature I particularly liked was that most chapters have a guest interviewee who is a subject matter expert answering a short series of interesting questions that add depth and perspective to the topic in hand.

Despite the book being relatively short (I see this as a positive at just over 200 pages), it acts as a great starter to the subject, and you can then conduct more in-depth reading on specific chapters as your requirements determine.

My only small gripe with the book is this very point - that there are not reference sources for future research at the end of each chapter or at the end of the book. Dan - please note for your 2nd edition!

Despite being written in 2007, and considering how quickly technology moves along, this is still largely bang up-to-date. I would strongly recommend this as an excellent purchase for anyone interested in broadening their knowledge on this fascinating and increasingly important field of design.

This book is helping me to understand how i need to start to design interactivity for Digital Television. A must-have.

This book reads like the author sat down on a weekend afternoon, typed out a draft and simply published it. The text is basically a sequence of obvious statements. In fact, this book is so bad I don't want to waste many words reviewing it. So I am going to randomly select 4 sentences from this book:

- Most applications and devices that interaction designers design have some sort of visible controls for the user to use to manipulate the features of the product. pg 136
- Designers should be open and nonjudgemental and should not assume that they know the answer beforehand. pg 80
- It is more important now than ever before that our digital tools have the characteristics of good interaction design baked into them. pg 203
- The system needs an assortment of responses to deal with a range of situations. pg 38

Believe me, I haven't chosen these lines consciously - I closed my eyes, turned to some page, put my finger down and typed the sentence my finger landed on. The whole book is filled with such drivel.

I wish I could give this item a rating of zero. Spend your money elsewhere.

I am an aspiring interaction designer and this book by Dan Saffer really nails it for me in terms of laying down a coherent and well-written overview and framework.

This book is essential to the interaction design community in that it defines clearly what interaction design is (and is not) in this early stage of this new industry.

It is also essential reading for all beginning or aspiring interaction designers.

The useful information in this book could be condensed into a 10 page article. The rest of the book is just irrelevant or uninformative photos, self evident ideas, and short interviews with designers. There is knowledge for designers between the covers - but not a bookload. This book tells you how to go about researching for design, but doesn't tell you anything about what other researchers have learned.
If you are looking for a book that helps you decide how to position the controls and labels on your latest widget, this isn't it.