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

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About the Author

Joel Spolsky, a software industry veteran, writes a column called Joel on Software on the Web (http://www.joel.editthispage.com). He has designed and developed software used by millions of people and has worked on a variety of products, from Microsoft Excel to the Juno user interface. He is a founder of Fog Creek Software in New York City.

Reviews

From the reviews: "He picks apart commercial products from big companies, showing their UI mistakes. I love that."
Dr. Dobb's Journal "The author of a popular independent website gives you a book about what programmers need to know about user interface design. Spolsky concentrates especially on the common mistakes that too many programs exhibit. Most programmers dislike user interface programming, but this book makes it easy, straightforward, and fun. It is written with an audience of programmers in mind, but does not assume any prior programming knowledge nor any specific programming language." (Amazon.co.uk, April, 2001) "This book offers many useful pointers on designing user interfaces which even experienced programmers should need. The 18 chapters cover topics ranging from effective use of colour to metaphors and usability testing. Underlined throughout is the most fundamental principle that ‘a user interface is well designed when the program behaves how the user thought it would’. The style is informal, humorous and anecdotal. There are numerous examples of design at its worst, each with an explanation of why the design is poor." (Richard Avery, The Computer Bulletin, March, 2002)