"Pick, Click, Flick! is an impressive reference manual of the many years of interaction design development. It is a reference book, invaluable when questions arise, whether while you are busy designing something, or learning, or teaching, where assigning sections of the reference will be a valuable resource and learning tool for students. Brad Myers has provided a great service to the interaction community."
——Don Norman, Distinguished Prof. Emeritus, Design Lab, University of California, San Diego

"Every UX professional should immerse themselves in this book. Not only does it unravel the fascinating and complex history of GUI widgets that will captivate any user interface nerd, but it also stands as the definitive guide to an incredibly diverse array of interaction techniques. This is not just an engaging read; it's an essential toolkit."
——Jakob Nielsen, Principal, Nielsen Design Group

★This book provides a comprehensive study of the many ways to interact with computers and computerized devices.
★Written for anyone interested in interaction techniques, including computer scientists and designers working on human-computer interaction, as well as implementers and consumers who want to understand and get the most out of their digital devices.

An "interaction technique" starts when the user performs an action that causes an electronic device to respond, and includes the direct feedback from the device to the user. Examples include physical buttons and switches, on-screen menus and scrollbars operated by a mouse, touchscreen widgets, gestures such as flick-to-scroll, text entry on computers and touchscreens, interactions with conversational agents such as Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Microsoft Cortana, and adaptations of all of these for people with disabilities.
Beginning with a history of the invention and development of interaction techniques, the author goes on to describe the various approaches in use today, continuing with a discussion of the state-of-the-art research that is driving the development of novel approaches for the future. The book features summaries of interviews with some of the original inventors of interaction techniques, including David Canfield Smith (the desktop and icons), Larry Tesler (copy/paste), Ted Selker (IBM TrackPoint), Loren Brichter (Pull-to-Refresh), and many others. The author also describes how to use, model, implement, and evaluate new interaction techniques.

Brad A. Myers is the Charles M. Geschke (SCS 1973) Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, with an affiliated faculty appointment in the Software and Societal Systems Department. He was chosen to receive the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in Research in 2017, for outstanding fundamental and influential research contributions to the study of human-computer interaction, and his most recent book, "Pick, Click, Flick! The Story of Interaction Techniques" won a 2025 CBI Human-Computer Interaction History Prize. He was awarded the 2022 Alan J. Perlis Award for Imagination in Computer Science "for pioneering human-centered methods to democratize programming", from the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. He is an IEEE Life Fellow, ACM Fellow, member of the CHI Academy, and winner of 19 Best Paper type awards and 6 Most Influential Paper Awards. He is the author or editor of over 550 publications, including three books, and he has been on the editorial board of 8 journals. He has been a consultant on user interface design and implementation to over 90 companies, and regularly teaches courses on user interface design and software. Myers received a PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto where he developed the Peridot user interface tool. He received the MS and BSc degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during which time he was a research intern at Xerox PARC. From 1980 until 1983, he worked at PERQ Systems Corporation. His research interests include user interfaces, programming environments, programming language design, end-user software engineering (EUSE), API usability, developer experience (DevX or DX), interaction techniques, programming by example, mobile computing, and visual programming. He belongs to ACM, SIGCHI, IEEE, and the IEEE Computer Society.