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January 24, 2006

A Good UI Book

A while ago, I asked beltzner if he could recommend one book about user interface to me, what it would be.  He suggested User Interface Design For Programmers by Joel Spolsky. I just finished it; great stuff.  Very easy to read, and lots of good concepts and concrete examples.  Highly recommended.

Posted by dmose at January 24, 2006 4:46 PM

Comments

"gui bloopers" by jeff johnson - http://web-bloopers.com/gui-bloopers/ is also excellent (and should be mandatory reading for anyone doing UI stuff).

Posted by: byron at January 24, 2006 11:19 PM

Out of curiosity: Could you give an example of a "good concept" you learned from the book?

Posted by: Peter Lairo at January 25, 2006 3:38 AM

Spolsky's book sounds interesting. I'll check it out.

Another book I'd recommend is About Face by Alan Cooper. Not only does Cooper take you through the history of software UI design (including decisions at Microsoft that he was involved in), explaining why we have menu items, keyboard shortcuts, and toolbar buttons for many commands, he also goes into great (sometimes excruciating) detail about how humans think/feel/behave and how to make programs compatible with them (rather than the other way around).

I read the original, but the latest edition is called "About Face 2.0" and has an added author (Robert M. Reimann), so presumably there are some changes or additional material in it, although I don't know what they are.

Posted by: Myk Melez at January 25, 2006 11:31 AM

Peter: one example was the concept of an "affordance", a piece of UI that suggests an action to a user.

Posted by: Dan Mosedale at January 26, 2006 5:03 PM

Tip: There are 9 chapters from this book available to read online at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000057.html

Posted by: Stefan Sitter at January 27, 2006 10:49 AM