GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Do's for Software Developers and Web Designers

by Jeff Johnson

Book Overview

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,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1558605827
• ISBN13: 9781558605824
• Release Date: March 2000
• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
• Length: 576 Pages
• Weight: 2.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 7.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A worthwhile and useful read

This book is aimed at both desktop application GUI developers and website developers. It shows real world examples of bad practice and for each one shows how to do things better. The book strongly advocates a user and task focused view of software. The book is interesting, and at times thought provoking. One area that the book only touches on in passing is accessibility---that's a big topic in its own right but more mention could have been made of it. This is not a book about "fonts and colors", but about user interaction: how to make it as easy and natural as possible for users to complete the tasks they want with the software. I would recommend this book to anyone doing application or website design since at the very least it will make you more conscious of your users, as well as providing many helpful ideas about how to do things in ways that work.

so you thought you knew about User Iterface design?

I thought I understood ease of use on the web, until I read this book! Jeff Johnson REALLY understands UI design--there are pages and pages of pearls in this book, useful tidbits that continually had me saying "why didn't I think of that?!", and demonstrating the value of his significant experience in this area. Also, as a manager, I learned a lot about the different collaborative roles that must come together (graphics vs. developer vs UI, etc.), and how managers can sabotage their important web project by ignoring or postponing UI design until it's too late. For managers, this section of the book alone is worth the price. Highly recommended.

Excellent GUI reference

This is a wonderful book! It's well organized and comprehensive, a quick and entertaining read, even for those without the technical credentials to design a web site. There are lots of examples that make the concepts easy to understand and apply. We're hiring software developers to design our new website. GUI Bloopers 2.0 gave us a common language we can use to engage with prospective teams. Most important, the Management Bloopers chapter points out how managers can undermine the best web design and how to avoid it. It's a great guide for professionals, but I also highly recommend it to everyone who works with them.

Most practical UI book I have read - excellent organisation

If your introduction to HCI was through one of the usual books by Hix, Dix, Schneiderman, Preece etc this book will come as a breath of fresh air. Unlike other books on the subject, this one is not academic and in fact it has one of the most practical approaches I have come across. Not groundbreaking like "About Face", but certainly more useful to everyday developers.After going through the theory in the first chapter, the author lists 82 GUI bloopers organised in logical sections, grouped under 7 chapters - thus making the book easily searchable. At first you might think that the book provides a few laughs at the expense of GUI screen shots from software applications publicly available. It certainly does that and it is very entertaining from that point of view, but that is just a side effect of the real value it offers.Every blooper is described in terms of why it is wrong, accompanied with screen shot examples and reasons why a developer might have committed the mistake. It finishes off by describing the remedy to the blooper and providing GUI solutions for the screenshots that were 'named and shamed' earlier. The approach is very instructive but not overbearing.Categories include GUI components, layout & appearance, textual, interaction and responsiveness bloopers. Believe me: these are not extreme GUI errors that we never commit; read this book and prepare to be enlightened. It has earned a place on my reference shelf and I am already referring back to it every now and then. We are also using it as a checklist for UI products in Alpha/Beta development and for assisting in the production of a new in-house style guide.

Excellent advice; This book needed to be written

GUI Bloopers details a set of very specific ways developers commonly misuse specific GUI elements. Most of the bloopers are "minor" mistakes that are easy to make. For example, incorrectly "greying out" inactive controls and using text fields to display text that isn't editable. However, Jeff Johnson makes a powerfull case that these "minor" errors can have a major effect on usability.The details cover a broad range of topics relevent to almost any computing professional. Web programmers will enjoy the _extensive_ discussion of the proper use of form elements. Web designers will welcome the section on the proper use of text vs graphics. Traditional applications programmers will like the section on performance and responsiveness.Given the very specific nature of the advice, GUI Bloopers doesn't help much with overall, high-level user interface design. For advice of that nature, check out Jef Raskin's "The Humane Interface." What Bloopers DOES provide are some additional details to think about when implementing your UI. It also has good advice on development methodology, including the importance of early and frequent user testing.And this book definetly needed to be written; I identified _MANY_ of the bloopers in my current (fortunately unfinished) application. It also finally convinced me to include user testing in my development process, after several other UI books failed to persuade me of its importance.My only problems with the book are really more the editor's fault than the author's. Firstly, GUI Bloopers can be overly wordy. For example, Johnson spends 6 pages struggling to get across the idea that extremely small font sizes are bad. Some good editing could probably have reduced the page count by 15%-25%. Also, none of the illustrations have captions explaining what they represent (only numbers), forcing readers to scan the text for references to "figure #21". A decent editor would have pointed this out.However, harvesting the advice in GUI Bloopers is worth a little rubbernecking. Unless you happen to be a usability guru or quasi-genius, reading GUI Bloopers will definetly improve the usability of your applications.