Customer Reviews

User Interface Design for Programmers

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

UI Design for Programmers is an excellent guide to creating intuitive, usable software interfaces for the real world. The light tone and frequent anecdotes make it a pleasure to read, I finished the book the day after it arrived. Very refreshing compared to the dry, technical style of most other computer books. I would highly recommend it to anyone who designs interfaces for any type of software or web-based application.

One of the first question I always notice about books: Is the title honest? For this book I can unabashedly say, Yes. This book is for programmers.

I've been a full time developer for just over 5 years. Making technology work is my game, but when it comes to designing UIs, it's more like random dart throwing and voodoo. But, considering some of the stuff I've seen other people put out. . . my stuff is not too bad! Still, I like doing a professional job and users expect programmers like us to know UI design-in spite of the fact most of us can't even draw decent stick figures!

The best thing about this book is Joel speaks my language. He makes art comprehensible to the techny. Not an easy accomplishment, but Joel is no ordinary guy either. He runs his own ISV in New York City and hosts one of the most popular software development blog sites around. (joelonsoftware.com) To survive financially in a place like NYC says something of his abilities. This book like his other writings bear that out: great concepts, great illustrations and well packaged thought.

One note, this book is about principles of design. It is not a quick how-to book. If you need some templates for a GUI project you are starting tomorrow, or need to know the ins/outs of a particular OS graphical system, this book isn't for you. But, if like me you've struggled with every new UI and are searching for guiding principles, this book is great!

Many of us have come to expect very good writing from Joel, and this book delivers. Joel writes in an engaging style and provides us with proper examples to get his point across. The book is divided into properly named sections with titles that we have come to expect from Joel, such as "People can't read", "People can't remember" and "People can't control the mouse". All of which bring up important issues that seem to come up for me in UI design.
However, when I was done with this book, I felt like something was missing. Because the book is more of a collection of tips rather than a unit by itself. In my opinion, this fact makes this book lose some "flow". (This style fits into "Joel on Software" though)
Overall, I think it's a good book to start you off with UI design but definitly not the only resource you should have access to.

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.

This is a great book if you're someone who knows little about UI Design. If you've been around UIs for a bit, then stay away, you'll find it to be a waste of time. The author explains basic concepts of UI design and provides an example or two. He does a good job at explaining his simple concepts, so this book might be a great way to start with IU design.

Mr. Spolsky makes the book lots of fun to read by including entertaining, yet educational, anecdotes. The book is a bathroom-read... buy it an read a chapter or two in letrine. :)

The book was ok, but I was expecting more substance.

The book started out promising -- it talked about things like "user models" and "progamming models"; But somewhere along the way the author veered away from things that sounded like "theory" and more into a "hey let's sit down at the pub and shoot the poop about user interface design and how it was back in the day."

I do feel like there were some good points raised, but only a couple of them in the 18 chapters were really innovative viewpoints. (The rest were things you would expect to hear in any book on UI design).

The book BADLY needs to be updated. It's quite obvious that it was released before Windows XP, since many of the gripes that the author has about Windows were addressed with XP (including the "start button is a few pixels from the corner" issue) -- and the author continuously refers to bandwidth / lag issues on the Internet; which, if you haven't been living under a rock the past 3 years, is pretty much a non-issue anymore as broadband becomes more and more ubiquitous.

The conversational tone of the book was nice, at times, but I felt it deviated from my expectations of the book based on the title. (my "user model" differentiated from the book's "program model" so to speak) There really wasn't anything about the book that involved programming -- very few actual examples were used, and really, I'm not sure that I'm taking home anything that is going to help my UI design at all. It would be like someone telling you ABOUT their experience fishing: ("Make sure you get a decent boat, use a good fishing rod, and bring lots of beer"), rather than telling you about how to fish BETTER: ("When you're baiting your hook, use live bait for ___ fish, and casting distance should vary proportionally with...." [i'm really not much of a fisherman])

In other words, there was a lot of "why" answers but not a lot of "how" answers, and so I felt a bit disappointed.

Steve Krug's book "Don't Make Me Think" is both current AND extremely helpful -- if you are looking for a book on Web Usability, I highly recommend that.

If you're looking for one specifically about HOW to improve the UI of your software... well, let me know if you find one, because I'm still looking too.

This book provides excellent concepts to bear in mind when designing the UI. Moreover, it is really fun and easy to read! I enjoyed it a lot, and I would recommend it to any developer, as it made me realize the importance of good design and it helped me improve as a software designer.
I read someone else's comments that the book is not very thorough. I don't know about that, but in any case I would say it is an excellent FIRST book on user interface design that gives you what's most important: the motivation on the subject to read forward.