Developer to Designer: GUI Design for the Busy Developer (Paperback)

by Mike Gunderloy (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Programmers undoubtedly agree that poor GUI design produces frustration and lost productivity, while user-oriented GUI design creates software products that are easy to learn and highly efficient to use. If you're a professional developer who wants to learn how to design robust and effective GUIs, this book is for you. It carefully addresses GUI design component by component, covering topics such as user input and navigation, user choices and customization, plus practical GUI design for the Web. With hundreds of examples and real-world anecdotes, Mike Gunderloy follows the same systematic and practical approach that made his recent book "Coder to Developer" immensely popular.

From the Back Cover
In a fantasy world, you design and build the core of your application, the parts that do all the heavy lifting. And the graphical user interface? Well, that’s the domain of the hot-shot sitting one cube over, who went to school to learn how to give users sensible and effective control over the functionality you construct.

In the real world, there is no hot-shot sitting one cube over, and you have to build the GUI yourself.

Developer to Designer: GUI Design for the Busy Developer is a unique resource designed to help you and other experienced developers build GUIs for your programs that are simple to learn, easy to use, and painless to maintain, even though you’re not user interface experts. Inside, the focus is on the essentials of Windows and web GUI design: simple ideas that require modest programming effort but provide enormous payoffs in terms of user success and satisfaction. You’ll learn all about:

Arranging text and controls in a sensible order

Understanding and making the most of the behavior of windows

Improving the effectiveness of dialog boxes

Using advanced controls such as TreeViews, ListViews, and tabs

Designing menus and toolbars

Providing users with sensible customization options

Understanding how the rules change when designing for the Web

Handling page layout and navigation on the Web

Anticipating changes in the next version of Windows

Throughout, author Mike Gunderloy is doggedly realistic. Like in his previous book, Coder to Developer: Tools and Strategies for Delivering Your Software, Mike describes how things actually work and prescribes ways for you to achieve meaningful results without staging a revolution. This is hard-won, practical knowledge from a veteran developer whose advice, examples, and overall vision will change the way you think and work.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 346 pages
• Publisher: Sybex (January 21, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 078214361X
• ISBN-13: 978-0782143614
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #603,330 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good for guidelines, but lacking on design, May 27, 2005

By	Lars Bergstrom "LarsBerg" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Resources on how to use each of the UI controls and dialog styles in which circumstance are scattered throughout the MSDN library and articles. This book does a great job of bringing all of that information together into one place and, as such, is a reasonable first reference manual on how to put together a UI application.

However, this book didn't cover what I expected to see: how do you design a good UI? Given a set of three activities to do, how do you map that into a flow across the application? How do you do simple usability studies using a friend or family? I was sorely disappointed, as those techniques are what turn a UI from a set of controls that a developer slapped together into an application that feels like it was designed to be used for a purpose.

Also, don't think that this goes into all of the details. Given the depth he went into on control use, I was expecting to see some of the Windows Logo guidelines in there, perhaps as an appendix - buttons will be such and such dialog units from the corner, etc. Instead, there are intro chapters on *forming* Avalon and HTML. This seemed out of place given that there was no intro chapter on using the Visual Studio .NET design surfaces and they read more like there was a page target for the book than that the content was part of an overall plan for the reader.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good at covering the basics, February 21, 2005

By	Michael Shaffer (Littleton, CO United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Mike Gunderloy has put together a nice book to follow up his Coder to Developer, this time covering the basics of UI design and concepts. A good book, but not perfect. What's good: he systematically describes in detail all the major components making up the modern Windows user interface. Don't do Windows? That's okay, a lot (if not all) of the components have their equivalents in other operating systems/UI shells. If you've never done UI design, either by choice or you've never had to, this is a good place to start. I've not found a book yet that covers the UI basics, without being wrapped up in a particular language or technology. The author's premise is a sound one; rare is the project that has the luxury of a dedicated UI specialist. Most business applications are done by developers that are typically not trained in User Experience or the like. So if you think that a good UI is easy and you just drag some of them white boxes on to the form, with a bunch of buttons too, this is a good book for you. I also appreciate his coverage of the web browser based application. There has been a lot of work in standard UI styles that got tossed out the window when the web based app hit. Mike does a good job dealing with that too. What's not so good: I thought that the chapter spent on Avalon, Microsoft's future UI was wasted, as it is inconsistent with the premise of the book. We'll need the new version of the book in a couple of years, once Avalon/Longhorn have shipped. I would have preferred the space used for more details on the current UI styles. My other issue is that this is a book for beginners. If you follow what Tog or Jef Raskin are doing in UI design, this isn't the book for you. If you feel challenged by Alan Cooper's ideas, then keep looking, this is a beginner's book and you are not going to find what you're looking for here. And this is not a criticism, merely an admission that this book is for a particular skill level, just like other development books. I'm glad to see Sybex and Mike Gunderloy giving the User Interface it's due and hopefully making developers realize that there is a little more to UI design.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Lacking Good Technical Content, January 11, 2005

By	M. Hawley - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Just finished reading the book and I must say that this book is lacking good technical content. It focused more on trivial things and explained them too in-depthly. Plus, it seems that windows based design was the focus and web based design was brought in as an afterthought. It doesn't nearly have as much content or good design recommendations. Also, don't even get me started on the introduction of "Avalon" into the book. This chapter was completely out of place in this book. The lackluster chapter described something thats a year or more off, not to mention stuff that is going to change. Not anywhere in this chapter did it explain good design patterns for Avalon, as currently there are none. This chapter seemed more of an "intro to avalon" chapter - which is why I thought it was out of place.