Author:	Jeff Johnson
Made:	Morgan Kaufmann
Date:	17 March, 2000
Media:	Paperback
Sales Rank:	8861
Availability:	Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price:	$49.95
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Rating: 4.5/5 from 26 reviews

A perfect companion for "official" user interface guidelines

Rating: 4/5

This is an indispensable book for anyone involved in the making of software. In 560 pages, Jeff Johnson presents 82 carefully selected examples of mistakes in GUI software and mistakes occuring in the process of developing GUI software (a GUI Blooper). Instead of just pointing his fingers at the Bloopers which are listed, Mr. Johnson provides a VERY exhaustive walk-through of the mistakes including: Why is this a mistake, what category does it belong to, what could be done to remedy the situation (including examples), common reasons for committing this mistake. As extras, two case stories from Mr. Johnsons career as an UI consultant are provided together with some general remarks on user centred development. My favorite chapter of the book contains examples on GUI mistakes wich are due to poor management. This chapter ought to be required reading for any software manager. The Bloopers are grouped in seven chapters: GUI Component Bloopers; Layout Bloopers; Textual Bloopers; Interaction Bloopers; Web Bloopers; Responsiveness Bloopers; Man-agement Bloopers. This grouping combined with a very extensive index makes this book ideal for reference purposes. The layout of the book is simple and clear - some may say boring. There are a number of drawings with examples of remakes of GUI elements which, although effective, are somewhat poor. For dictionary purposes this book may rightly deserve 5 stars. But due to the fact this book is overly wordy (I would say that 20% of the text is superfluous) and due to a somewhat content weak chapter on Web Bloopers, it will have to do with just four stars.

Solid reference for the interface designer

Rating: 4/5

GUI Bloopers is a catalog of interface design bloopers and fixes. The book is divided into 10 chapters: First Principles, 7 chapters on various categories of bloopers (GUI Component, Layout and Appearance, Textual, Interaction, Web, Responsiveness and Management), Software Reviews (reviews of Eudora Pro 4.0 and Kodak Picture Disk 1.2) and War Stories (accounts of the author's experiences as a consultant to two different software projects).

The book's major strength is that it provides good, detailed descriptions of typical problems and realistic fixes for them. It is not a book of theory or magic bullets but a book for people who want to actually improve their interfaces in a straightforward and substantial way. The book also provides a set of 8 first principles which are the fundamentals of creating good interfaces. There are a good variety of Windows and Mac examples.

The book has few weaknesses and it accomplishes what it set out to do. The most glaring flaw is the lack of captions beside each illustration of a blooper or an example of good design.

I would recommend this book to any interface designer or programmer who writes small in-house applications and does the interface design as well as the coding. There are probably better references if you are looking for something specifically on web design, although the first principles the author discusses certainly hold.

Good pratical advice

Rating: 4/5

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.