Customer Reviews

Microsoft Windows User Experience (Microsoft Professional Editions)

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

 

 

This book is a frame by frame, widget by widget, menu item by menu item prescription for "proper" Windows application etiquette. By following this book's advice, your applications will look and feel just like a member of Microsoft Office. You'll learn everything from how many units to space a button from the border of a box to how to select multiple discontinuous pieces of text and then copy and paste them across applications. There's even instructions on editing the registry so that your documents can be printed from the explorer.

It's essentially a style guide for Windows GUIs the way the Chicago Manual of Style is a style guide for writing English. It won't make you a good writer, but no one will correct your punctuation.

I actually found this book useful from a Windows user perspective. It tells you how all the controls are supposed to work. If you use MS apps a lot, you've probably intuited a lot of this, but it's interesting to see it all laid out.

This book does not explain how to use the Windows APIs to create GUIs. Get a book on Visual C++ or VB for that. This book does not explain how to design a usable application. Read Jeff Johnson's GUI Bloopers or Alan Cooper's About Face. This book does not teach you to be a visual designer.

This book is about as interesting to read as a typical user's manual. It's one unforgiving piece of advice and description after the next without a single case study in the entire 500+ pages.

Even so, if you want to understand how Windows apps are "supposed" to behave or you have to write such applications yourself, this book is a must-have.

A great reference book that makes it easy to follow the Windows interface standards. Microsoft has come a long way with their user interfaces, and this book lets you learn from their efforts.

I haven't finished this book yet, but so far I'm very pleased. It's very comprehensive, and contains many screenshots. It also contains information about integration w/ Internet Explorer, which is important to me. The only downside is that it's written by Microsoft, so some of Windows' shortcomings aren't really discussed.

While the MS Windows User Experience will be a necessary reference book for MS UI developers, it fails as a general guide for creating a "great user experience." Scaning the first chapter, for example, I just had to laugh: I had been just reading a text on the new Macintosh OS X interface then switched to the Windows book. The Mac OS X UI guide was simplistic and bland, while the first chapter of the Windows guide was verbose and unnecessarily complex. How stereotypical is it possible to get? Also, in chapter one of the MS book there are less than 2 introductory pages of positive text, then 16 pages on what NOT to do.

If you are looking for a book which lists MS Windows UI elements, and contains the official MS explanation of what to do with them, this book would be handy to keep around. However, if you are looking for an excellent book on user interface and "user experience", I highly recommend going to the Macintosh web site and downloading, for free, the "ancient" (by computer standards) 1995 Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines (which differs greatly from the Mac OS X book mentioned above).

Great book on how to design a graphical user interface correctly. Very useful if you want to follow Microsoft's user standards (and why wouldn't you).

C'est un excellent ouvrage pour tout ce qui concerne l'interface graphique Windows. Il est relativement bien illustré. Il comporte de très nombreuses expériences d'utilisateurs pour permettre de développer des logiciels conviviaux et parfaitement adapté à l'environnement Windows.