Customer Reviews

GUI Design Essentials

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

i wrote my diploma thesis about interface design and this was the worst book i have read. the authors repeat themself again and again and again. to less info, too much blahblah. for me, this book was nearly useless (and as i live in europe i paid lots of money for it!). sorry, but i'm really upset. btw. the best book i have read was theo mandels elements of user interface design!

Many GUI books are primarily about design, and are full of profound but essentially useless prescriptions such as "Use space creatively" or "Your design should be balanced, but hey, asymmetry can be cool, too." This book, in contrast, is primarily about GUI construction. The first part is about the mechanics of designing an interface: requirements gathering, prototyping, usability testing, and so on. The remainder is made up of checklists: Avoid horizontal scrolling; place pop-up windows in the center of the action; limit checkboxes to ten. The final chapter lists some best-practice guidelines with section headings like "Who to Involve" and "What to Customize."

The authors write a nice, although somewhat expensive alternative to Cooper's "About Face," Howlett's "Visual Interface Design," and Mullet's "Designing Visual Interfaces," etc. However, the contents of the CD do not match the statements made on the cover of the book, nor the text within the book. For example, despite what the publisher states, I found no pdf files on the CD. I suspect that they are shipping different versions (?) of the CD with the same book. I called the publisher, they seem to deny this, or maybe they are oblivious to it. Maybe the CD is nothing special (as another reader, Jarrett, December 15, suggests). Oh well.

This book provides an excellent and practical guide to the process of creating effective User Interfaces. I have used the GUI Design process as well as the Web design process successfully on a number of different projects. The techniques are described in a straight-forward, easy to understand manner. The guidelines and checklist templates are a great starting point. The User Interface Design Document template has been especially valuable for communicating how the interface should work to the development teams. It is quite easy to customize it to fit the needs of each project. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in introducing an Interface Design process to their development organization, or to anyone who needs to develop an effective Web site.

This books seems to contain a great deal of information that has been distilled out many better books. It's content is very thin on any one topic, and it concentrates on structural features of the interface (like buttons and list boxes) without really getting to the meat of user interface design: task flow and behavior. Every topic covered has much better coverage elsewhere. Read Alan Cooper's _About Face_ for a much better discussion of behavioral design, Edward Tufte's _Visualization of Quantitative Information_ for information design, and Jakob Nielsen's _Usability Engineering_ for usability testing and heuristic evaluation instead. And keep a copy of Microsoft's _The Windows Interface Guidelines for Software Design_ handy as a reference. The included CD-ROM is also a bust -- develop your own guidelines from scratch rather than using theirs.

As usability consultants, we have used GUI Design Essentials as a reference for many client projects, large and small. We often recommend it as the 'one' book to buy, especially for programmers, users, and others who don't have extensive user interface design experience. We also use it ourselves as a reference and good source of examples. Two important strengths of the book are: 1) it is obviously based on practical experience, the techniques work; and 2) it covers a broad range of subjects. The book covers user interface design methodology (a step-by-step process), usability testing, and standards and guidelines for GUI and Web apps. For very in-depth coverage of any particular topic of interest, you might want to consider books that focus in specific areas, such as The Handbook of Usability Testing by Jeff Rubin, the Windows Interface Guidelines from Microsoft, and Designing Object-Oriented User Interfaces by Collins. The CDROM included is a bonus- we've used it as the basis for several corporate GUI standards projects. Although you will want to extend the topics, why reinvent the wheel on the basics?

GUI Design Essentials is the most practical reference that I have encountered that covers all aspects of GUI design. The title says it all. It provides you with the essentials on user-centered design, usability testing, web design, online help systems, and much more. I liked the fact that the book focused on the critical or essential elements with just enough supporting details to provide the reader with a good level of understanding. The methods and tools described can easily be immediately applied to real-life work. Having used the sample forms and documents from the book, they have proven to be extremely effective tools. The appendix containing the list of GUI design guidelines is like getting 2 books for the price of one. I would highly recommend this book if you are looking for a single source containing practical information on all areas of interface design.

Weinschenk's book provides the practical "how-to" of interface design, using sample projects to illustrate the process of designing a good interface. I particularly enjoyed her opening section, "A Tale of Two Software Projects."

I found two main strengths in this book: It provides a step-by-step approach to the process of interface design, and she provides guidelines for all aspects of a windows-based interface. Therefore, if you're not sure how to approach the design of an interface, you can follow her guidelines to a successful conclusion.

Similarly, if you need interface standards but aren't sure what all they should include or how to state them, you can't go wrong if you adopt the guidelines in this book for your own interface project. This book also provides forms and checklists to facilitate your design projects.

An added bonus to the Weinschenk book is the CD-ROM that accompanies it, which provides some of the chapters in the book as Word 7.0 and PDF files so you can easily adopt and adapt the information for your own projects.

GUI Design Essentials is a quick, easy to read guide for creating GUI interfaces. The book's foundation is built on hints and tips - making it an excellent read, but more importantly a resource for developers struggling with difficult design issues. The book covers all the important aspects of design: designing for the web, "how to's" of usability testing, presentation and interaction issues etc., etc. I use this book as a training tool for people new to design. It gives them a solid introduction to user centered design and provides them with an ongoing resource for their future projects.