In GUI Bloopers, consultant Jeff Johnson uses 550+ pages to illustrate common pitfalls in user interface design, the all-important iceberg tip that end users confuse with applications and that developers confuse with end users. Reporting on 82 incidents of bad design, Johnson manages to cover the essential point of his message: software designers should think of their user interfaces from the user's point of view. Not profound, but profoundly overlooked in most low-end to mid-range development efforts. His codification of GUI design in eight predictable principles will help GUI newbies realize that the customer must be pleased with the product. Of course, the customer doesn't always understand what he or she wants. Hence, GUI development is iterative. When the customer is not at hand, a surrogate will do, so usability testing is essential. The bloopers include mistakes in window design, labeling consistency, visual/grammatical parallel construction, coherence of look and feel, and clarity. Most perceptively, Johnson observes that CPU speed in the development group hides many design mistakes. Moreover, context-scoping, already a subtle problem in software design, must be implemented in GUI design. Input error handling is the most psychologically sensitive of all GUI design characteristics. User error messages can easily be too vague or too specific, and diagnostic error messages should be user-manageable, if not actually user-interpretable.
Like the Hollywood outtakes that gave us the "blooper," the entertainment quotient here is measured in mistakes, not successes. Teaching by counter example rather than by example at an estimated ratio of three to one, Johnson panders to our invertebrate instinct to measure our own successes by someone else's failure. To his credit, he recognizes that user interfaces include pedestrian texts (like his) as well as graphical interfaces for computer applications. His self-referential style gives the book an egocentric slant, but he is both priest and practitioner: he submitted a draft to usability testers and reports the results in an appendix. One criticism was that there were too many negative examples. Hmmm.
Thanks to other tester comments, GUI Bloopers is a browsable book, allowing the few nuggets of wisdom to be located. For the most part, the book's value can be captured by reading the seven-page table of contents carefully. --Peter Leopold
Review
"Better read this book, or your design will be featured in Bloopers II. Seriously, bloopers may be fun in Hollywood outtakes, but no movie director would include them in the final film. So why do we find so many bloopers in shipped software? Follow Jeff Johnson as he leads the blooper patrol deep into enemy territory: he takes no prisoners but reveals all the design stupidities that users have been cursing over the years." --Jakob Nielsen, Usability Guru, Nielsen Norman Group
"If you are a software developer, read this book, especially if you don't think you need it. Don't worry, it isn't filled with abstract and useless theory--this is a book for doers, code writers, and those in the front trenches. Buy it, read it, and take two sections daily." --Don Norman, President, UNext Learning Systems
From the Back Cover
"Better read this book, or your design will be featured in Bloopers II. Seriously, bloopers may be fun in Hollywood outtakes, but no movie director would include them in the final film. So why do we find so many bloopers in shipped software? Follow Jeff Johnson as he leads the blooper patrol deep into enemy territory: he takes no prisoners but reveals all the design stupidities that users have been cursing over the years."
-Jakob NielsenUsability Guru, Nielsen Norman Group
"If you are a software developer, read this book, especially if you don't think you need it. Don't worry, it isn't filled with abstract and useless theory--this is a book for doers, code writers, and those in the front trenches. Buy it, read it, and take two sections daily."
-Don NormanPresident, UNext Learning Systems
GUI Bloopers looks at user interface design bloopers from commercial software, Web sites, and information appliances, explaining how intelligent, well-intentioned professionals made these dreadful mistakes--and how you can avoid them. While equipping you with all the theory needed to learn from these examples, GUI expert Jeff Johnson also presents the reality of interface design in an entertaining, anecdotal, and instructive way.
This is an excellent, well-illustrated resource for anyone whose work touches on usability issues, including software engineers, Web site designers, managers of development processes, QA professionals, and usability professionals.
Features
- Takes a learn-by-example approach that teaches you to avoid common errors by asking the appropriate questions of your own interface designs.
- Includes two complete war stories, drawn from the author's personal experience, that describe in detail the challenges faced by UI engineers.
- Covers bloopers in a wide range of categories: GUI components, layout and appearance, text messages, interaction strategies, Web site design, responsiveness issues, management decision-making, and even more at www.GUI-bloopers.com.
- Organized and formatted based on the results of its own usability testing--so you can quickly find the information you need, packaged in easily digested pieces.
About the Author
Jeff Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco. He is also a principal at Wiser Usability, a consultancy focused on elder usability. After earning B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale and Stanford, he worked as a UI designer, implementer, manager, usability tester, and researcher at Cromemco, Xerox, US West, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun. He has taught at Stanford, Mills, and the University of Canterbury. He is a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy and a recipient of SIGCHI's Lifetime Achievement in Practice Award. He has authored articles on a variety of topics in HCI, as well as the books GUI Bloopers (1st and 2nd eds.), Web Bloopers, Designing with the Mind in Mind (1st and 2nd eds.), Conceptual Models: Core to Good Design (with Austin Henderson), and Designing User Interfaces for an Aging Population (with Kate Finn).
