White Pond Design Home

White Pond Design Reading List


Reference Books and Links

White Pond’s goal is the effective communication of information. White Pond Design draws from a palette of disciplines to ensure high quality interactive communication environments.

Reading List

  • Donald Norman The Design of Everyday Things, Currency Doubleday, (1988) All customer focused design lists should include this work.
  • Jakob Nielsen, Usability Engineering, AP Professional,(1993) A foundation (don't look at useit...)
  • Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano, Designing Visual Interfaces, SunSoft Press, Prentice Hall, (1995) A book on User Interface Design that communicates about "design".
  • Alan Cooper, The Essentials of User Interface Design 1,2, &3 ,IDG Books, (1995, 2003, 2007) Meat and potatoes UCI Design issues, still the best.
  • Paul Kunkel, Apple Design: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group, Paul Kunkel, (1997) Worth its weight in Krugerrands, literally
  • Donald A. Norman, Emotional Design - Why we love (or hate) everyday things, Basic Books (2004) So, why do I love my iPhone?
  • Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think, New Riders Publishing (2006) Great book.
  • Suzanne & Taylor Kathy Schroeder, Inside Intuit, How the Makers of Quicken Beat Microsoft and Revolutionized and Entire Industry, Harvard Business School Press (2003) What it takes for usability.
  • Bill Scott & Theresa Neil, Designing Web Interfaces, O'Reilly Media, Inc. (2009) Anchored to the wisdom of the greats, this is great book of contemporary patterns.
  • Andrea Butter & David Pogue, Piloting Palm The inside story of Palm, Handspring, and the birth of the billion-dollar handheld industry, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (2002) What it takes for usability.
  • Robert Brunner and Stewart Emery, Do you matter? How great design will make people love your company , Pearson Education, Inc. (2009) OK.
  • William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler, Universal Principles of Design, Rockport Publishers (2003) Excellent overview of design principles.
  • Robert L. Lewis, Informational Graphics, A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference, Oxford University Press, (1999) Excellent review of graph design techniques.
  • Aristotle, translated with notes by Richard Janko, Poetics, Hackett Publishing Company (1987) Why art works.
  • hartmut essiinger, a fine line, how design strategies are shaping the future of business, Jossey-Bass, (2009) I so wanted it to be good.
  • Bill Moggridge, Desiging Interactions, MIT, (2007) mildly interesting...
  • Brenda Laurel, The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, Addison-Wesley, (1990) A complilation of many viewpoints on the subject (The early Apple days...)
  • Bill Buxton, Sketching User Experiences. getting the design right and the right design Morgan Kaufmann, (2007) Cool guy, wanted the book to be better.
  • Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre, Addison-Wesley, (1993) Excellent treatment of new directions in user interface design.
  • Ben Shneiderman, Designing the User Interface – Third Edition, Addison-Wesley, (1998) One of the standard user interface design references.
  • Randolph G. Bias and Deborah J. Mayhew, Cost-Justifying Usability,Morgan Kaufmann (Academic Press), (1994) A complilation of many viewpoints on the subject.
  • Dennis Wixon and Judith Ramey,PhD Field Methods Casebook for Software Design, Wiley Computer Publishing, (1996) A complilation of many viewpoints on the subject (thank you Dennis).
  • Aaron Marcus, Nick Smilonich, and Lynne Thompson The Cross-GUI Handbook, Addison-Wesley, (1995) A good (historical) way to see different approaches to the same problem.



Web sites



Information Display and Interaction (early explorations in HCI)
Craig Maxey


Classical works of Edward R. Tufte

We try to adhere to the guidelines offered by the excellent reference books of Edward R. Tufte, specifically:

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Graphic Press, (1983)

Envisioning Information, Graphic Press, (1990) "The Nouns".

Consistent with Tufte’s values placed on the aesthetic needs of the Information Customer, Envisioning Information received the "Best Graphic Design of the Year" from International Design. We are particularly sensitive to the issues of "Micro/Macro" (solutions that offer the IC both a big picture and detail viewpoint of information at the same time) , "Color and Information", and "Escaping Flatland" (exploring how to represent several dimensions of information on a 2D surface, computer screen, towards the goal of maximizing the information density per screen pixel).

and his most recent work,
Visual Explanations, Graphic Press, (1997) "The Verbs".

"Edward Tufte's new book, Visual Explanations is about pictures of verbs, the representation of mechanism and motion, process and dynamics, causes and effects, explanation and narrative". (Explores the documentation of magic as a guide for illustrating action.)


Overview Papers:

  • CNN Interactive: An Information Visualization Perspective, by Chandrasekar Gnanasambandam. Don’t let the title fool you; this analysis of the CNN home page offers an excellent challenge to the newspaper metaphor and its questionable appropriateness to the WEB.
  • Visualization of Abstract Information, by Rolf Daessler (1995)
  • Graphical Elements for Information Browsing Systems, by David Fox
  • Some User Interface Issues for Hypermedia Virtual Environments, by Chris Hand
  • The Three Mirrors of Interaction: a holistic approach to user interfaces, by W. Buxton. This is probably in the wrong section but my appreciation of Mr.Buxton’s excellent work probably clouds my judgment.



Xerox PARC et. al.:


Probably the most recognized work in hierarchical information display and interaction has been done by the folks at Xerox PARC. You can’t explore for long without appreciating the efforts of Stuart K. Card, G. Robertson, and of course J.D. Mackinlay. Apparently the definitive work represented in the "Perspective Wall", the "Perspective Tree" and the "Hyperbolic Tree" (the later of significant importance in the fact that it represents the optimal 2D visualization of the WEB’s intrinsic hierarchical information structure) has finally been "thrown over the wall" to XSOFT (Xerox commercial software products). There are other works focusing on the same subject, e.g. Fractal Approaches for Visualizing Huge Hierarchies, by Hirotaka Yoshihara, but the clear baseline has been offered by this work by Xerox. An excellent illustration of the "Information Visualize" 3D interface was included in the September 23, 1996 issue of PC Week. Lyberworld - IR & DB Information Visualization appears to be a very related visualization technique.



VRML and other 3D WEB Navigation,
Visualization Projects

VRML is being used to represent both literal metaphors, (rooms, cities, and people) and abstract metaphors (glyph representing data objects). It is my judgment that the goal of maximizing the information encoding per screen pixel precludes the use of literal metaphors. Consequently my VRML references only reflect work in the area of abstract data visualization

  • AMAZE - Development of a Visual Query Language
  • SAGE - Exploring 3D Visualization Techniques
  • GeoSpace: An Interactive Visualization System for Exploring Complex Information Spaces, by I. Lokuge and S. Ishizaki (Media Lab)
  • Navigational View Builder: Visualizing the Information Space of Hypermedia Systems (GVU)
  • InfoSpace: A Conceptual Method for Interacting with Information in a Three-Dimensional Virtual Environment.
  • Apple Computer - HotSauce
  • Browsing 3D Bookmarks in BED
  • Visualize! Interactive Data Visualization on the WEB
  • SGI's Webspace
    3D File System Navigator for IRIX 4.0.1+ (Silicon Graphics)
  • Lycos 3-D Search Engine
  • University of Birmingham, HyperSpace
  • Virtual Programming Environments
  • Information Visualization Great visualization links




The Use of Semi-Transparency in Information Visualization

Use of transparency to support information visualization and interaction

  • Transparent Layered User Interfaces: An Evaluation of a Display Design to Enhance Focused and Divided Attention, by B. Harrison, H. Ishii, K. Vicente, and W. Buxton
  • The Information Cube: Using Transparency in 3D Information Visualization, by Jun Rekimoto, Sony. This display technique has clear value!!
  • GeoSpace: An Interactive Visualization System for Exploring Complex Information Spaces, by I. Lokuge and S. Ishizaki (Media Lab)
  • Data Explorer on Decision Support: IBM Corporation
  • An Experimental Evaluation of Transparent Menu Usage, by B. L. Harrison and K. J. Vicente, University of Toronto (CHI 96)




Scientific Visualization

  • Scientific Visualization Sites NAS (NASA)
  • Data Explorer on Decision Support: IBM Corporation
  • Scientific Visualization and Computational Science:
    Natural Partners by Samuel P. Uselton.