Books by Theo Mandel

Book Info

Excerpts & Reviews

Front Cover

Theo Mandel, Ph.D.
John Wiley & Sons, 1997
448 pages
156 illustrations
$49.99
ISBN: 0-471-16267-1

Book Brochure (PDF)
Front Cover
Back Cover
Back Cover Info (PDF)
Readers Roadmap (PDF)
Table of Contents (PDF)
Preface (PDF)
Chap. 5: Golden Rules of User Interface Design (PDF)
Book Review - ACM Computing Reviews (PDF)
Book Review - Core Competence (PDF)
Book Testimonials (PDF)

"I loved your book on UI design. I want you to know that your insights helped my company be successful. I spent (and spend) a great deal of time on the usability design of my products - primarily due to being influenced (and sensitized) by you."
Bill Schafer, CEO, OrthoSpot

"I recommend this book both as an excellent introduction to concepts and principles related to interfaces and as a low-key introduction to object orientation. It would be difficult to use as a textbook because it lacks exercises, but it would be valuable in both undergraduate and beginning graduate courses because Mandel clearly distinguishes users from developers, action-object from object-action styles of interaction, and object orientation from application orientation. These distinctions are likely to be among the most enduring and valuable information readers take with them."
Dara Lee Howard, ACM Computing Reviews

"Let me say your book 'The Elements of the User Interface' is fantastic. I own my own copy of it. My aspirations with regards to user interfaces are to one day go to graduate school to study and earn a degree in HCI and use that knowledge in private interface consulting."
Aaron Bieberitz, Computer Science major, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay

"Possibly the single best overview to creating easy-to-use interfaces. Entertaining and complete. An absolute must for visual designers and programmers."
Advanced Training Technologies SIG, on Dr. Mandel's first book, "The GUI-OOUI War"

"As a software developer in the midst of a user interface design project, I carried this book coast to coast several times this summer, reading and re-reading portions of immediate relevance to discussions I'd had that day. Never was I disappointed. Rarely did I find a quick and easy 'cook book' answer, available for immediate but mindless application. Instead, I'd characterize this book as 'food for thought,' dishing out observations on man-machine interaction with generous dollops of seasoned insight.'
Lisa Phifer, Core Competence, Inc. (Complete review)

"The best usability book I have ever read is 'The Elements of User Interface Design' by Theo Mandel, and I'm certainly glad I bought it when developing.
It certainly doesn't insult anyone by quoting usability laws without any sound practical basis. It gives you practical situations where tips on usability can be put into practice, and it then tells you the effects it has on users and why and gives examples of real applications. I like books like that. You can quote laws until you're blue in the face, but ultimately they have to have a common sense effect."
David Segendunum, Actuaria Co. (UK)

Theo Mandel, in my favorite HCI book "The Elements of User Interface Design", doesn't use the word 'widget' once, but only talks of 'interface controls'.
Reinout van Schouwen, University Student

Dr. Mandel's second book covers user interface design and software usability in four parts:

• Foundations of User Interface Design
• Object-Oriented User Interfaces
• The User Interface Design Process
• Advanced User Interface Techniques and Technologies

This book is a comprehensive guide for software developers, designers, managers, and students. It covers the evolution and implementation of software user interfaces through graphical and object-oriented interfaces (GUIs and OOUIs). It covers a interface design process, complete with case study examples.

Undergraduate and graduate-level courses use The Elements of User Interface Design as a course textbook.

Book Info

Front Cover

Theo Mandel, Ph.D.,
Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994
415 pages
100 illustrations
$29.95
ISBN: 0-471-13149-0
(Out of print)

OS/2 Magazine listed it in its hottest computer books for 1994. Bob Orfali, co-author of the bestseller The Essential Client/Server Survival Guide, wrote:

"A computer will never feel the same after you finish reading this fascinating book. Theo gives us a behind-the-scenes tour of the human-computer interface. You'll discover that Windows 3.X is just the start. OS/2's Workplace Shell is the next step. And the best is yet to come. This book can be read by anyone who uses a PC. Read it--it will change the way you think about your computer."

OS/2 Professional magazine wrote:

"The GUI-OOUI War is a book that should be forced on every Windows and OS/2 developer working today...it will prove invaluable to software developers, and likely intriguing to curious users. If only half the rules in this book were followed, the quality of most programs would increase tenfold. If you want to know what makes an application interface successful or you want to make a good program great, there's no better starting place.

Dr. Mandel's first book took a comprehensive look at past, present, and future software user interfaces and compared graphical and object-oriented interfaces (GUIs and OOUIs). It also covered interface design techniques and demonstrated the effects of computer interfaces on users.

Book Info

Front Cover

IBM
Que Publishing, 1991
ISBN: 1-56529-170-0
(Out of print)

Dr. Mandel was part of the IBM Common User Access (CUA) interface architecture team that developed and wrote the first guide for object-oriented user interface design. IBM's OS/2 Warp and Microsoft's Windows first graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are based on this work. Dr. Mandel worked closely with Microsoft's architecture team for a number of years on this industry guideline.

Dr. Mandel wrote the appendix on multimedia interfaces.

The book is a classic. It now sells on Amazon.com as a collectible item.