[.ca] GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Do's for Software Developers ... (ISBN 1558605827)

From Amazon.com:
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

Well organized and full of practical issues:
This book is well worth reading. It has hundreds of useful ideas. For usability issues Steve Krugs "Don't make me think" I still consider the best. Johnsons book is a little too thick to be easily read in one go of a few weeks. Johnson manages it well to write a book which is both good to read and essentially contains a very long list of single issues. The entrance into the book I found rather steep. Principles before examples are difficult to grasp. Finally I found the extensive discussion of the books of his usability fellows valuable.

How it helped me:
I read this book knowing really nothing about gui design. It is a very methodical book and was extremely helpful to me. I even took the time to make a checklist of things to look out for and then applied the concepts to my designs. The result is that on every software demo we give of our product developed using the checklist, we get the same comments: "Wow! This is really easy to use/learn!" nuf said.

Good pratical advice:
Overall I liked this book. It has many practical guidelines, that you can apply immediately. My only problem was there were many trivial bloopers and many bloopers which may not be bloopers. Again and again he refers to his reviews of client software. He rarely refers to his user studies or other research. This makes me question if some of his bloopers are really bloopers or just his opinion.

Experienced developer opinion:
I've been a developer over the paste 13 years so I am, as one said, the main target for cryptichism (from the author's point of view) in this book. But I've got to admit it, he is almost always, right. Never, in my life, i've found such an amount of good advices compiled together. If you want to improve usability this is a good choice. Congratulations Mr.Jeff Jonhson! You are one of kind.

An essential guide for GUI software developers:
This book is an essential read for anyone developing GUI applications. The style of writing and the huge number of examples is very well suited to the GUI software developer. Often books in this area are more suited to usability groups and so are too theoretical for developers to get into. With this book however, Jeff has produced a practical and essential development guide and avoids many of the research details that put developers off. Not to leave out those that are prepared to delve deeper into the usability area, each chapter has concise references and a recommended reading section. There are no excuses. If you are developing or designing GUI applications you must read this book!