Books for the UX / IA in the modern age

Sometimes a book from outside the discipline can stretch your imagination and lead to new ideas.

Not new, but 'Emergence' by Steven Johnson fits this bill perfectly. The clearly explained (I'm no mathematician) models for the growth and development of networked systems of all kinds provide excellent analogies for online behaviours, both of humans and of technologies like search algorithms. The sheer breadth of the examples is a reminder that, while we may be redesigning the wheel, we are far from reinventing it when we build new types of networked environments and tools to use them.

In a similar vein, Clay Shirkey's 'Here comes everybody' suprised me. Initially skeptical about yet another social media crit, it turns out that, while he certainly does have the 'chatting in the pub' writing style and a tendency to stretch out each point to fill the full book, there is much in the book that was well evidenced, refreshingly formulated (such as his progression through the implication of electronic communications from the banal facebook threads to the downfall of entire governments), and insightful.

Science vs Fiction

But often it is the most irrelevant reads that can kick us back into thinking like the real world, and remind us of the complexities inherent in medium that we are dealing with as interaction designers: human behaviour.

'Happy families' by Carlos Fuentes, a Mexican author with a sharp wit and a wealth of experience, is a collection of tales from the edge of family life. Sisters, brothers, mothers, daughters - all flawed, all affected, all wrong in some sense.

And it is the 'wrongness' of people that I too easily forget. The smudges and smears in people's actual existence that make their behaviour diverge from the scientific norm, or the agreed cognitive pathway. For all our skill in the science, interface design will always be a big part art as we try to 'feel' our way into the experiences of others and anticipate what they might need to achieve the goals.

People push the CPU aside

Which of course we can't. No one can ever get it right - the ultimate interface that supports all and frustrates no-one. But the more online transactions are about human interaction through the medium of technology, and less about a single human interacting with a rational system, then the more we need to accept the unpredictability of the outcomes. Sometimes, nothing beats a good novel to teach us about human nature.