The book is written by Joel Spolsky (www.joelonsoftware.com) who provides an entertaining look at user interface design from a programmer’s perspective. Joel is good at seeing things from both a non-technical and technical perspective. He provides some great guidelines in this book, which for the most part I agree with 100%. The book could be updated to reflect a lot of the changes that have occurred over the last few years in the area of web development. The non-web parts of the book are excellent though, and I would recommend this book to anyone who builds user interfaces. The book stays focused on usability and not “use this color and this font” type of issues. The book is not for designers, it’s for programmers, but even designers could learn a thing or two from reading this book.
My two favorite quotes from the book are:
“A user interface is well designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.”
and
“Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point font sans serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.”
