artificial intelligence

The breath and depth of this text truly embodies the necessary content for beginning HCI students in an undergraduate and graduate program. I've successfully used this text every semester with my students since its inception. The author's perspective of the discipline accurately reflects an increasing trend in HCI education that places less emphasis on computing and more on designing products to enhance human communication based on the social sciences. It is organized to provide an instructor a way to pick and choose selected chapters or proceed sequentially. Each chapter is multi-dimensional in its approach to provide an array of content that includes both theory and practice. I highly recommend it.

I have successfully used this book as the major text in both undergraduate and post graduate HCI and Interaction Design subjects. I am grateful that is available as it is by far the best text available for these subjects. It is particularly strong on the social and contextual issues that are so fundamental to the design of robust and usable technology and are often so difficult to convey to students who lack real design experience.

It is well organised, very clearly written and provides many useful examples and practical exercises. These are all designed to make some very complex material accessible to readers whatever their knowledge of the field. I have also used some of the support material that is available for those teaching from this text. It is designed in such a way that it can be easily incorporated into existing course material and has saved me a lot of time!

The book is long-winded and filled with copious padding stuff. The authors seem forgot the basic design principle. It is extremely annoying to read the same material again and again on the same page and in different chapters, especially when the material covered is already common sense in nature.