Rating: 
Summary: Excellent guide to the process of creating User Interfaces
Review: This book provides an excellent and practical guide to the process of creating effective User Interfaces. I have used the GUI Design process as well as the Web design process successfully on a number of different projects. The techniques are described in a straight-forward, easy to understand manner. The guidelines and checklist templates are a great starting point. The User Interface Design Document template has been especially valuable for communicating how the interface should work to the development teams. It is quite easy to customize it to fit the needs of each project. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in introducing an Interface Design process to their development organization, or to anyone who needs to develop an effective Web site.
Rating: 
Summary: Definitely not worth buying or reading.
Review: This books seems to contain a great deal of information that has been distilled out many better books. It's content is very thin on any one topic, and it concentrates on structural features of the interface (like buttons and list boxes) without really getting to the meat of user interface design: task flow and behavior. Every topic covered has much better coverage elsewhere. Read Alan Cooper's _About Face_ for a much better discussion of behavioral design, Edward Tufte's _Visualization of Quantitative Information_ for information design, and Jakob Nielsen's _Usability Engineering_ for usability testing and heuristic evaluation instead. And keep a copy of Microsoft's _The Windows Interface Guidelines for Software Design_ handy as a reference. The included CD-ROM is also a bust -- develop your own guidelines from scratch rather than using theirs.
Rating:
Summary: A good, practical road map to interface design
Review: Weinschenk's book provides the practical "how-to" of interface design, using sample projects to illustrate the process of designing a good interface. I particularly enjoyed her opening section, "A Tale of Two Software Projects." I found two main strengths in this book: It provides a step-by-step approach to the process of interface design, and she provides guidelines for all aspects of a windows-based interface. Therefore, if you're not sure how to approach the design of an interface, you can follow her guidelines to a successful conclusion. Similarly, if you need interface standards but aren't sure what all they should include or how to state them, you can't go wrong if you adopt the guidelines in this book for your own interface project. This book also provides forms and checklists to facilitate your design projects. An added bonus to the Weinschenk book is the CD-ROM that accompanies it, which provides some of the chapters in the book as Word 7.0 and PDF files so you can easily adopt and adapt the information for your own projects.
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