There’s no “standard text” on user interface design

If you want to learn to build software, there are excellent and complete texts on the subject. It’s not just a tech-vs-art thing: there are standard texts on type, drawing, color, etc.

Of course, there are lots of great books peripheral to (and useful for learning) the topic of software interface design: Inmates…, Design of Everyday Things, Tufte, etc. But these don't aspire to be complete introductory guides to the subject, like How to Design Programs.

My Twitter thread on this.

Contenders

• About Face: great coverage of broader design product process, but concrete details on interface design quite limited
• Don’t make me think - Krug: focused on web sites and info arch, not much discussion of interactive interfaces
• Designing the User Interface (Ben Shneiderman et al): huge breadth of coverage, but surprisingly little detail about how to actually go about designing a user interface, concretely; academic perspective feels disconnected from actual industry practices
• Apple Human Interface Guidelines (aka HIG, 1987): a great treatment of a few key ideas and some of their instantiations, but really not intended to be a systematic primer

Theories

• “You can’t teach that in a book.” It’s probably not the ideal medium, but I don’t buy the argument. c.f. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Elements of Typographic Style, Gradus ad Parnassum, Interaction of Color, etc
• “It’s too new to have a good book.” a) Not really: you could write a good book about the concepts in the 1984 Macintosh interface. b) Even if you insist on starting from the multi-touch era: there are already outstanding books about, say, deep learning.
• Writing a canonical book wouldn’t be valued by that culture (socially, economically, etc).” Maybe… but even if you believe “most designers don’t read much,” they sure value audiovisual media. Where’s the 3blue1brown / minutephysics / vihart of interface design?
• “All the knowledge is locked up in golden handcuffs and NDAs. It’s all in the Apple HI people who’ve been there for 20 years.” Partially true, but not enough. Four of the best interface designers I knew at Apple left since in the past eight years.
• “Why write a book like this when you could spend your time actually designing interfaces and earning $X00k/yr?” A fair question, but it also applies to e.g. programming texts, and there are tons of canonical works there.
• (via Ben Kuhn) There are way fewer UI designers than programmers (maybe ~5% as many per some quick Googling) so you’d expect ~5% as many books, which is maybe <1?
• (via Ben Kuhn) Programming is closer to writing than UI design is, so programmers are more likely to write books