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User Interface Design for Programmers View Larger Image | Joel Spolsky
Apress, Paperback, Published June 2001, 144 pages, ISBN 1893115941 | List Price: $34.99
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(From the Introduction)
Most of the hard-core
programmers I know hate user interface programming. This surprises me, because
I find UI programming to be quintessentially easy, straightforward, and fun.
It’s easy because you usually don’t need algorithms more sophisticated than
how to center one rectangle in another. It’s straightforward because when you
make a mistake, you immediately see it and can correct it. It’s fun, because
the results of your work are immediately visible. You feel like you are sculpting
the program directly.
I think most programmers’ fear of UI programming comes from their fear of doing
UI design. They think that UI design is like graphics design: the mysterious
process by which creative, latte-drinking, all-dressed-in-black people with
interesting piercings produce cool looking artistic stuff. Programmers see themselves
as analytic, logical thinkers: strong at reasoning, weak on artistic judgment.
So they think they can’t do UI design.
Actually, I’ve found UI design to be quite easy and quite rational. It’s not
a mysterious matter that requires a degree from an art school and a penchant
for neon-purple hair. There is a rational way to think about user interfaces
with some simple, logical rules that you can apply anywhere to improve the interfaces
of the programs you work on.
This book is not “Zen and the Art of UI Design.” It’s not art, it’s not Buddhism,
it’s just a set of rules. A way of thinking rationally and methodically. This
book is designed for programmers. I assume you don’t need instructions for how
to make a menu bar; rather, you need to think about what to put in your menu
bar (or whether to have one at all). You’ll learn the one primary axiom that
guides all good UI design, and some of the corollaries. We’ll look at some examples
from real life, modern GUI programs. When you’re done, you’ll know about 85%
of what it takes to be a significantly better user interface designer.
Table
of Contents
- Foreword by Dave Winer, Founder, Userland Software
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1: The Perils of Multithreaded Programming
- Chapter 2: Figuring out what they expected
- Chapter 3: Choices
- Chapter 4: Affordances and Metaphors
- Chapter 5: Broken Metaphors
- Chapter 6: Consistency and other hobgoblins
- Chapter 7: Putting the User In Charge
- Chapter 8: Design for Extremes
- Chapter 9: People Can't Read
- Chapter 10: People Can't Control the Mouse
- Chapter 11: People Can't Remember
- Chapter 12: The Process of Designing A Product
- Chapter 13: Those Pesky Usability Tests
- Chapter 14: Relativity Understanding UI Time Warps
- Chapter 15: But...How Do It Know?
- Chapter 16: Tools of the Trade
- Index
Customer Reviews
Customer Reviews: 2 Average Customer Rating: May 17, 2005 Jeff Wilsbacher from Santa Cruz, CA
An acceptable introduction to usability for programmers
Need to know as quickly as possible "what is this usability thing?", this book serves as a good and fast introduction. Joel's writing style has a strong appeal for some, if you're one of them and unlikely to read another book on usability, pick this up and read it. If I was to suggest one book on usability it wouldn't be this book though, it would be "Don't Make Me Think" (faster, less depth but better understanding about what makes UI tick even though it's focus is webpages) or "About Face 2.0" (longer, more in depth) or "Tog on Software Design" (perhaps badly named, but we are certainly near or at a period of time when we can do the things he suggested years ago).
Jan 29, 2003 Tim Hodgson (thodgson@exclamationsoft.com) from Philadelphia, PA
The absolute best book on UI
I borrowed and read this book front to back in a short amount of time for a project. I liked it so much that I'm buying a copy of my own to keep for future reading.
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