Customer Reviews

User Interface Design for Programmers

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I just borrowed this book from my local library and read it. The points made by this book are either well-known, or super outdated. I guess it was new at the time, but time has changed. It is not useful anymore to point out the design flaws of Windows 95 vs Mac. This book is too old for today's applications. Please only get this book from library and read for fun.

My family kept asking me how I could possibly be laughing so much at a book on programming. The anecdotes in this book are fantastic at conveying fundamental UI principles, but they're also so entertaining that I finished the entire book the day I got it.

User Interface Design is a topic which I have always been interested in. I believe it was PCWorld Magazine that used to have a column dedicated to improving the design of a submitted interface, and there were many things I learned from that column. This book seems to work from the basis of that column, but doesn't go as far as I would have liked it to.

There are many anecdotes included in the book, and they were very illustrative as to the problems people encounter when working with a badly designed interface. I especially liked the concept of the mile-high menu bar that Mac users have, and how that compares to the small footprint that a Windows user must target to open a menu.

Still, I was left wanting more. The book serves as a great introduction, but if you're already done some UI Design, you might already be familiar with most of what is explained in the book. The anecdotes are what really make the book appealing, but I wouldn't recommend purchasing the book just for those.

It's a good book, it just falls short of what it could have been.

Lots of great stories and examples, good illustration though at times it seems quite disjoint with the text and just thrown in for example's sake.

Overall not a whole lot there though. A great idea if it were better executed. Lots of fluff, unfilled pages and wide spacing make for a quick read and empty feeling.

This book is an excellent first book on UI design. It covers a lot of ground and is easy to read. The author is both witty and entertaining. An excellent read.

Joel Spolsky has brilliantly condensed the essential points of usable interface design into a witty, entertaining, and brief book.

A witty look at UI design, the strength of this book is in its scope. It covers everything broadly - while it is true not all environments have the same flexibility, there is enough here to get you started and get you thinking of alternatives for whatever your particular issue is. This is a good refresher / introduction into UI design and is a must to have on the shelf.

The strength of this book is that it's one you'll read. With its light style, an abundance of colorful illustrations, and plenty of white space, it can easily be read in a single sitting. It makes quite a few good points, and does so with the help of excellent visual examples.

On the other hand, the scope of the book is so broad that its applicability to a specific environment or task will be limited. Unless you're developing an entire operating system, your choices in designing a user interface are constrained by the environment you're working in. Web developers don't have the same choices as Windows developers, who are in a different world from text-based programmers. If the book focused on a single environment it might have been as useful as it is entertaining.

This is a good starting point for application developers, but you'll need something more specific if you want much practical guidance.

While this book is not in the usual sense a tutorial or a reference manual, it instructs and I will refer to it when creating user interfaces. This book is like a collection of short essays that are fun to read around a common theme, how to create good user interfaces. The overall effect is to modify the programmer's philosophy about user interfaces.

I am stilling mulling over a lot what Joel has to say. Although the book is rather short, it covers it subject rather well. There are no exact formulas for creating great user interfaces. Rather, the author gives some guidelines to consider when developing. They are explained and accompanied with full color examples that illustrate the author's point from actual applications.

Many readers may think that these guidelines are just common sense, but after using numerous applications and websites, it may not be that common after all. Read the book, the consumers of your application may thank you afterwards.

It was a pleasure to read this book. Joel has an amazing writing style that is friendly, upbeat, funny, and insightful. While he clearly isn't the world's definitive expert on UI design, his years of real world experience and wealth of examples make this book both valuable and enjoyable. This has to be one of my favorite technical books.

Joel's irreverent, tell-it-like-it-is, approach is part of the charm of this book. For example, chapter 10 is titled, "People Can't Control the Mouse" and chapter 13 is titled, "Those Pesky Usability Tests". From my years of software development in the games industry, many of his points on UI design hit home in a big way. I was actually shocked at how applicable the entire book was to game development. As a professional programmer, I felt the book was talking my language and completely in agreement with my own experiences.

The truth is that there are so many boring and questionable technical books out there, it's refreshing to read something that is so honest and dead-on right.