This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Jeremy Voorhis. Original Post: Agile Book Club: Interaction Design Feed Title: JVoorhis Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/jvoorhis Feed Description: JVoorhis is a Rubyist in northeast Ohio. He rambles about Ruby on Rails, development practices, other frameworks such as Django, and on other days he is just full of snark. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Jeremy Voorhis Latest Posts From JVoorhis

To begin, I will share an email conversation that Joe O’Brien and I traded this morning:

Joe,

You made a wise purchase ;) About Face 2.0 isn't bad; it's full of some
great advice. My biggest gripes with it are the follows:

* It declares that programmers are just unfit for interaction design.
* It advocates for waterfall development.
* Cooper has a defensive tone whenever discussing his beloved discipline
of interaction design.
* The web chapter is dated.

If you can get over all of those things, it is full of great ideas,
specifically about working with personas, and data entry and retrieval.
You might also like Rapid Contextual Design - it is a book that builds
on some of Cooper's ideas and presents them in an agile-friendly way.

What I like about Design of Everyday Things is that it creates a
framework for thinking about usability problems, rather than handing out
specific advice. I think this allows for much more creativity, and gives
you more depth when supporting your design decisions.

Cheers

On Wed, 2006-08-30 at 09:35 -0400, Joe OBrien wrote:
> The Design of Everyday Things just arrived last night.   You're right,
> it's been great so far.  I'm really stoked about it.  
> 
> 
> I also went ahead and purchased About Face, I know it's not all
> great, but I'm still looking forward to it.
> 
> 
> Thanks again,
> -Joe
> 
> 
> 
> =======================
> are you living on the edge?
> theedgecase.com

This got me thinking: as developers, we invest a great deal of time and money in technical books. I value good recommendations that I receive, and I also enjoy passing them on. I also enjoy a good discussion about the content with other readers.

In order to foster this type of dialog, I have created a new Google group: The Agile Book Club. The group is public, and we would really like to have your input!