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42 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Programmers, find out why UI designers have it tough!, July 29, 2001
This review is from: User Interface Design for Programmers (Paperback)
Joel is a good writer who happens to be a programmer. That alone is enough to reccommend this one-of-a-kind book. His website contains tons of insightful, opinionated essays, and most of the time he's right, whether his topic is design, business stragegy, HR, or coding techniques. He's an ex-Microsoft employee who's saavy enough to know what MS does right and what they don't. In this book, much of which is available at his site, he's taking an approach that I don't think anyone else has: why UI design matters to programmers. He's not talking to experienced visual desingers, or HCI people, or interaction desingers or what have you. He's talking to programmers, the folks who will actually write lines of code. This book, in a quick 150 pages, shows programmers why interaction designers will spend, say, two days worrying about a couple of words or the placement of two buttons. Like Steve Krug's book "Don't Make Me Think", it's a somewhat lightweight treatment of the topic for an experienced UI desinger, but you'd be foolish to pass it up for that reason. This, along with Krug would be a great book for Project Managers or senior staff wondering what all the fuss about "usability" really means. Where Jakob Nielsen's preachy fussiness can bore you to tears, Joel and Krug will make you eager to put their ideas into practice. Any company that can get its programmers, managers, and designers on the same page about the still under-appreciated value of UI design (and the analysis that goes into it) will find they can make better products faster.
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29 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Overly generic, January 11, 2002
This review is from: User Interface Design for Programmers (Paperback)
As a programmer, I fit the stereotype and know very little about UI design. Although I was only looking to gain a basic understanding of design, I still found the book's coverage overly generic. The content can be summed up as follows: use tabs, do what Microsoft does, heuristics are overdone in many apps, test designs incrementally, don't overuse colors, and avoid all the fluff in web page design. Critical design issues such as color combinations, UI standards, and best controls for particular jobs were not covered. The author glossed over these by telling the reader to find out what metaphor the user expects and design the application in that context. Despite these failings, the book is well written and can be read rapidly. This book rates about two stars for content and four for readability. Overall, this book rates approximately three stars.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Enjoyable from Start to Finish, October 4, 2002
This review is from: User Interface Design for Programmers (Paperback)
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.
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