Rating: 
Summary: Has 2 good chapters.
Review: Most of the stuff is unusable. However the discussion of perception, grouping etc is excellent. Pretty steep price for 2 good chapters.
Rating: 
Summary: Waiting for the sequel
Review: So far the best text-book about GUI I found. It is rich and comprehensive, connects GUI design with modern design in general. Teches simple guidelines easily understandable by non-professionals. I had this book be a required textbook in the company I work for, for anybody that wants to take part to the UI design and review. The only problem: the book presents many many examples of "bad" UI design. We would like a sequel presenting more "good" design examples.
Rating:
Summary: Good information but bad presentation
Review: The book has very good information, instructions and guidelines about user interface design. However, it is written and edited poorly. They use way too many words and complex sentences to explain their concepts.
Rating: 
Summary: Lots of common sense with intriguing hints of something more
Review: There's something irritating about a book on graphical design of interfaces that refuses to use chapter numbers in the Table of Contents (or for that matter anywhere except the first page of each chapter) even though the text references them. Unfortunately the authors also fail in the contents to fully integrate these two aspects of design.The book really reads like two: examples of bad interface design, and a smorgasbord of interesting examples and tidbits from the graphic design lexicon. The former struck me as mostly common sense, while the latter just whet my appetite to read the sources in the bibliography. Overall: worthwhile looking at, but not something I would actually refer to while designing.
Rating:
Summary: required reading for all developers
Review: This book clearly shows good and bad ways to communicate to the user. I find myself returning to it often, and the principles shown can be used in information and Web design as well. Very well laid out, and easy for busy developers to digest, it still manages to get across what classic mistakes we keep on making, while getting across the things you should be thinking about while you're designing an interface. Excellent.
Rating:
Summary: Interfaces are very important and this book shows it.
Review: This book describes, so well, some interesting techniques to design good interfaces. I think the authors had a good ideia to introduce a lot of examples; the "bad" examples are so important as the "good" ones because they show how the users must be careful when they design the interfaces.
Rating:
Summary: Good information, flawed by presentation
Review: This book has a lot of great information, and the layout (of the information) is actually pretty good. Unfortunately, the density and otherwise poor quality of the prose and editing obscure this. I can't believe a book that costs this much, and whose focus is presentation, would have such glaringly obvious errors. I've never seen a book with so many typos. It also uses the incredibly wordy and verbose style often found in the art world, a technique that does not exactly help in demystification of a topic that surely needs it. The good news is that I was preparing a technical writing class as I was reading the book and it provided a ready source for exercises.
A good rewrite of this book, with up to date examples, is overdue. In the mean time, if you can wade through the prose, the information is definitely there.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, graphics oriented treatment
Review: This book should certainly not be your first book on GUI design. You might want to check out Alan Cooper "About Face", Johnson "GUI Bloopers" or a similar one which focuses in a broad way specifically on GUIs. If you are interested in Web design you might prefer the excellent "Don't make me thing" from Steve Krug. Even if you want to look at GUI design with a strong graphics bias you might first want to read the beautiful books of Tufte. Having said that and you still make it to this book. You get an excellent treatment of the graphic aspects of design in general and at many places with special applications to GUIs. Examples are posters, maps, public transportation information, different GUIs including the NextStep. If you like Piet Mondrian, the Bauhaus ... then you enjoy the positive examples a lot. The book gives some theoretical background and tries to help build our taste by showing good and bad solutions to design problems. The pictures are well reproduced (mostly black and white) and of good quality. The cover of the book is somewhat horrid (on line order saved me here from not buying it). Also it is extremely soft cover - way too soft for such a valuable book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, graphics oriented treatment
Review: This book should certainly not be your first book on GUI design. You might want to check out Alan Cooper "About Face", Johnson "GUI Bloopers" or a similar one which focuses in a broad way specifically on GUIs. If you are interested in Web design you might prefer the excellent "Don't make me thing" from Steve Krug. Even if you want to look at GUI design with a strong graphics bias you might first want to read the beautiful books of Tufte. Having said that and you still make it to this book. You get an excellent treatment of the graphic aspects of design in general and at many places with special applications to GUIs. Examples are posters, maps, public transportation information, different GUIs including the NextStep. If you like Piet Mondrian, the Bauhaus ... then you enjoy the positive examples a lot. The book gives some theoretical background and tries to help build our taste by showing good and bad solutions to design problems. The pictures are well reproduced (mostly black and white) and of good quality. The cover of the book is somewhat horrid (on line order saved me here from not buying it). Also it is extremely soft cover - way too soft for such a valuable book.
Rating:
Summary: One of the top five books in GUI design
Review: This is a great book if you know how to use it. Its not for people looking for cookbook approaches. Rather, it provides well argued information about the underlying principles of visual design. The authors ilustrate their points about grids, layout, typography, and color by showing examples of top notch efforts by some of the best information designers in the world. Classic examples like the London subway maps and the National Park Service brochures are illustrated, along with excellent explanations of the design principles that make these particular design so successful. The aurthors then go on to show how these examples can be applied to GUI design. And they are very gutsy as they show actual examples from actual software products that are "design failures". In fairness, they also show examples of well designed software, with explanations of why the design works so well. This book is for a person who's willing to invest some time to learn about things like information hierarchies and information design. Like playing a piano, this isn't something one can master over night, but also like playing a piano, it has its own vast rewards.
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