Rating: 
Summary: Solid reference for the interface designer
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: This guy knows his business!
Review: After completing only 2 GUI projects, I wish that I had read this book first. I would have saved hundreds of work hours. Now, I have the ultimate reference while testing, and defining the task......the bloopers are funny too!
Rating: 
Summary: Why I wrote GUI Bloopers
Review: As a user-interface design consultant, I go from company to company, advising them on how to make their computer-based products or services easier to use. Over the years, I found that certain errors are very common: I see them again and again, in company after company. I decided to start a collection of these common design errors, and eventually arranged with Morgan-Kaufmann to publish them in a book. That's where GUI Bloopers came from. I hope it is useful to you.
Rating:
Summary: Great combination of theory and application
Review: As a web designer with no software development experience, I found this book to be very helpful. I would recommend it to all web designers who have ever found themselves struggling with making site navigation and web applications user friendly. I've spent a great deal of time with some of the classics (Edward Tufte's books and Alan Cooper's About Face), but this book offers an ideal combination of theory and examples. Very glad I found it!
Rating:
Summary: An Essential Book for GUI Builders
Review: Computers and similar devices are the constant butt of jokes for one reason: bad interface design. The problem is that most professional programmers are amateur interface designers, and it shows. And it hurts. This book is by a pro whose career has been spent in designing interfaces and correcting the errors others make. He knows what he's doing, and we'd all be a lot better off taking his advice. If you are designing information-based products that interact with people, you should first understand every point GUI Bloopers makes. This is a how-to, with lots of good examples, clearly explained. It is neither a work of psychology nor does it delve deeply into reasons why things work or don't. Read GUI Bloopers along with Norman's delightful book, The Design of Everyday Things (for motivation) and Raskin's thoughtful and thought-provoking The Humane Interface (for future directions). This book made it instantly into the short list of my top recommended books for people who design interfaces. Get it, read it, follow it. Your customers will thank you.
Rating:
Summary: A complete how-to for GUI designers.
Review: Despite the title, the "Do's" section of this book is where the meat lies. The "bloopers" are used as lead-ins on how to design interfaces with a focus on usability. If you're even contemplating designing anything from a web page to an installation shield, you should read this book. Customers should read this book, and managers should read this book. The book's really not aimed at programmers or graphic designers, but they'll find it plenty interesting, especially since programmers and graphic designers often design GUIs. Johnson gives us a widget-by-widget tour of labels, text fields, buttons, radio buttons, check boxes, and overall layout management. But he doesn't stop there. The notion of usability also extends into issues like consistency. Even more important is responsiveness, the chapter on which is worth the price of the book alone. What makes this book so enjoyable is the multitude of case studies. These aren't meant to make you laugh out loud like Lucille-Ball-botching-her-line bloopers, but rather to get you to concentrate on the bigger picture of usability. The longer case studies of Johnson's experience as a consultant on a set-top-box design project and a game interface project are interesting if you're thinking about working with or becoming an interface design consultant yourself. Another benefit of the book is that it takes you through common and common sensical design strategies starting from needs analysis to paper prototyping to early focus group testing and refinement. The references to deeper studies in many of these areas are plentiful. This book is more focused on GUIs than books like Ben Schneiderman's _Designing the User Interface_, which is a useful, thoughtful survey, but reads like a Ph.D. thesis compared to _GUI Bloopers_. Johnson is also focused on usability, in contrast to something like the _Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines_, which focuses exclusively on graphical layout issues, such as how many pixels to leave around 9 point sans serif font in a button and what color scheme to use for highlighted icons. One final note: Johnson ate his own dog food and usability tested his book!
Rating:
Summary: A complete how-to for GUI designers.
Review: Despite the title, the "Do's" section of this book is where the meat lies. The "bloopers" are used as lead-ins on how to design interfaces with a focus on usability. If you're even contemplating designing anything from a web page to an installation shield, you should read this book. Customers should read this book, and managers should read this book. The book's really not aimed at programmers or graphic designers, but they'll find it plenty interesting, especially since programmers and graphic designers often design GUIs. Johnson gives us a widget-by-widget tour of labels, text fields, buttons, radio buttons, check boxes, and overall layout management. But he doesn't stop there. The notion of usability also extends into issues like consistency. Even more important is responsiveness, the chapter on which is worth the price of the book alone. What makes this book so enjoyable is the multitude of case studies. These aren't meant to make you laugh out loud like Lucille-Ball-botching-her-line bloopers, but rather to get you to concentrate on the bigger picture of usability. The longer case studies of Johnson's experience as a consultant on a set-top-box design project and a game interface project are interesting if you're thinking about working with or becoming an interface design consultant yourself. Another benefit of the book is that it takes you through common and common sensical design strategies starting from needs analysis to paper prototyping to early focus group testing and refinement. The references to deeper studies in many of these areas are plentiful. This book is more focused on GUIs than books like Ben Schneiderman's _Designing the User Interface_, which is a useful, thoughtful survey, but reads like a Ph.D. thesis compared to _GUI Bloopers_. Johnson is also focused on usability, in contrast to something like the _Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines_, which focuses exclusively on graphical layout issues, such as how many pixels to leave around 9 point sans serif font in a button and what color scheme to use for highlighted icons. One final note: Johnson ate his own dog food and usability tested his book!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent advice; This book needed to be written
Review: GUI Bloopers details a set of very specific ways developers commonly misuse specific GUI elements. Most of the bloopers are "minor" mistakes that are easy to make. For example, incorrectly "greying out" inactive controls and using text fields to display text that isn't editable. However, Jeff Johnson makes a powerfull case that these "minor" errors can have a major effect on usability. The details cover a broad range of topics relevent to almost any computing professional. Web programmers will enjoy the _extensive_ discussion of the proper use of form elements. Web designers will welcome the section on the proper use of text vs graphics. Traditional applications programmers will like the section on performance and responsiveness. Given the very specific nature of the advice, GUI Bloopers doesn't help much with overall, high-level user interface design. For advice of that nature, check out Jef Raskin's "The Humane Interface." What Bloopers DOES provide are some additional details to think about when implementing your UI. It also has good advice on development methodology, including the importance of early and frequent user testing. And this book definetly needed to be written; I identified _MANY_ of the bloopers in my current (fortunately unfinished) application. It also finally convinced me to include user testing in my development process, after several other UI books failed to persuade me of its importance. My only problems with the book are really more the editor's fault than the author's. Firstly, GUI Bloopers can be overly wordy. For example, Johnson spends 6 pages struggling to get across the idea that extremely small font sizes are bad. Some good editing could probably have reduced the page count by 15%-25%. Also, none of the illustrations have captions explaining what they represent (only numbers), forcing readers to scan the text for references to "figure #21". A decent editor would have pointed this out. However, harvesting the advice in GUI Bloopers is worth a little rubbernecking. Unless you happen to be a usability guru or quasi-genius, reading GUI Bloopers will definetly improve the usability of your applications.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent advice; This book needed to be written
Review: GUI Bloopers details a set of very specific ways developers commonly misuse specific GUI elements. Most of the bloopers are "minor" mistakes that are easy to make. For example, incorrectly "greying out" inactive controls and using text fields to display text that isn't editable. However, Jeff Johnson makes a powerfull case that these "minor" errors can have a major effect on usability. The details cover a broad range of topics relevent to almost any computing professional. Web programmers will enjoy the _extensive_ discussion of the proper use of form elements. Web designers will welcome the section on the proper use of text vs graphics. Traditional applications programmers will like the section on performance and responsiveness. Given the very specific nature of the advice, GUI Bloopers doesn't help much with overall, high-level user interface design. For advice of that nature, check out Jef Raskin's "The Humane Interface." What Bloopers DOES provide are some additional details to think about when implementing your UI. It also has good advice on development methodology, including the importance of early and frequent user testing. And this book definetly needed to be written; I identified _MANY_ of the bloopers in my current (fortunately unfinished) application. It also finally convinced me to include user testing in my development process, after several other UI books failed to persuade me of its importance. My only problems with the book are really more the editor's fault than the author's. Firstly, GUI Bloopers can be overly wordy. For example, Johnson spends 6 pages struggling to get across the idea that extremely small font sizes are bad. Some good editing could probably have reduced the page count by 15%-25%. Also, none of the illustrations have captions explaining what they represent (only numbers), forcing readers to scan the text for references to "figure #21". A decent editor would have pointed this out. However, harvesting the advice in GUI Bloopers is worth a little rubbernecking. Unless you happen to be a usability guru or quasi-genius, reading GUI Bloopers will definetly improve the usability of your applications.
Rating: 
Summary: Too 'black&white' - try Spolsky for a more realistic view.
Review: I agree with "A Reader" that the layout and organisation is bad.
The first chapter or so describes some very basic GUI problems - eg. confusing checkboxes with radio buttons. Maybe if you're a beginner or haven't used PCs much then this might be new to you, but to most programmers this is long-worded revision.
The bulk of the rest of the book describes wider problems. Generally valid, although everything is painted as black and white when reality is shades of grey - especially when GUI design advances and MS (& probably Apple) recommendations directly violate a number of points.
So with shades of grey it is easy for a cocky programmer to abandon the whole lot 'throwing the baby out with the bath water' as it were.
It would also be good if the author didn't keep telling us that he was a highly paid user interface consultant - this accentuates his approach as being a bit one sided, unlike the more realistic Spolsky.
Also recommend Spolsky's "User Interface Design for Programmers". This takes a much more overall/philosophical approach which should be more appropriate for experienced programmers.
He also has a more realistic view of management and testing; and the book is a far easier read.
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