Sometimes Google buys books for its employees, which we can take for free. I was checking the available options with Codrin when I found User Interface Design for Programmers. As I find the topic interesting, I figured I'd give it a read. Only back in the elevator, heading back to my cubicle, when it was too late to give it back, did I realize that the book was written by Joel Spolsky. I've read Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity (yes, that's the title of a book, and I guess Joel and his groupies think it makes a cool and hip title) and many articles by him and I have mixed feelings about him. The UI book sat ignored on my desk at work for months. I figured I'd take it with me on my trip to Colombia and maybe check it out here. I just finished reading it.
The book is entertaining and has some funny anecdotes. It does have some interesting ideas and it did help me come up with some ideas for how to improve some of my programs. I almost liked it.
However, somewhat similarly to Time Management for System Administrators, I get the feeling that the actual contents of the book could be presented in just a brief article. It also seems to be full of over generalizations and in some parts I got the feeling that Spolsky was just inventing fancy sounding rules that are just bullshit.
I'll give you an example. The book has a 6-pages chapter around a ridiculous set of “days are seconds, months are minutes, seconds are hours” rules. The chapter includes a summary of a science fiction novel and a fictional company that designs devices to grill marshmallows in the workplace. The entire chapter, however, contains no actual contents other than these:
- Designing aspects of a program that a user will only experience for a few seconds —such as a dialog— usually takes days of work. During the design, don't make the interface overly complicated, as the user only has seconds to use it.
- It typically takes months to produce a new software package; users, however, only have a few minutes to familiarize themselves with the concepts involved. Therefore, make them as simple as possible. Don't add complications, but remove them.
- When users have to wait for something for more than a second or two without doing anything, they get bored. They will complain that it takes “hours” to get something done. To ameliorate this:
- respond immediately to user's requests, giving feedback that acknowledges that their action has been received and will be executed,
- break up long operations and start executing them as soon as possible, while the user is doing other things with the interface, to minimize the longest wait, and
- when collecting user input, you can collect some input, make the user wait a minute, then collect some more input and then make the user wait again, and so on, but you should, instead, collect all the input at once and then tell the user to go have a coffee while the long operation is executed.
To me the first two aspects are just consequences of the same principle, which I'd formulate somewhere along the lines of “when designing a user interface, consider the amount of time that the user will typically spend on it familizaring itself with the concepts required to use it”, and the third principle is something else entirely.
The book is entertaining, to be sure —the stories are well told and mildly funny— and it does contain some interesting tips, but I'm fed of tech writers who think that in order to engage their audience they need to describe “That Really Cool but Top Secret B2A Company”, a fictional corporation founded by “Eeny the Elephant”, or summarizing Robert A. Heinlein's Time for the Stars. I do not want to read a book on UI design to be entertained; I want to read it to think about UI design, to talk about UI design. Conversely, if I want to be entertained, I'll go and read a science fiction novel, not Joel's hogwash.
All in all, it does contain some useful tips and, as I said, it did give me some ideas that I'll probably start applying, so if you don't mind the mindless chatter, go ahead and give it a read. Otherwise, I'd recommend you read The Prefect or Chasm City instead.
Discussion (1)Last update: 2009-12-24 (Rev 16585)