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The Amiga community has an abundance of shareware programmers, many of whom are very talented at writing good, functional programs. This, however, is only one part of the quest to produce a truly enjoyable game or useful utility.
Unfortunately, it is often the interface of a program - the GUI -that puts off potential users. Make a program easy too use, and people will use it Sounds easy, but like so many things in life, it's usually the simple things that are the hardest to master.
In his occupation as a "user interface consultant," Jeff Johnson has witnessed many GUI bloopers, from a lack of keyboard shortcuts to the overuse of buttons, from a proliferation of separate program windows to the use of inconsistent or tiny fonts - all of which make programs far more difficult to use than they should be. Frustrated by the lack of good interface design and the abundance of common errors, he has compiled this book which contains not only examples of the stupid things some programmers write into their GUIs, but also illustrations of the way things should be done.
Despite its sheer size, GUI Bloopers is easily digestible in bite-size chunks with separate sections on GUI Component, Layout and Appearance, Textual, Interaction, Web and Responsiveness Bloopers as well as an introductory chapter covering first principles and 'reviews' of real-life software. With all this, not to mention its sections on Management Bloopers (which Johnson hopes will lead companies to "take the additional steps necessary to design an organization that produces usable and useful products") and a chapter on designing controls for a set-top box, you can't help feeling that this is a book Amiga should be reading, just to make sure that we don't see examples of poor user-interface design in the upcoming line of new Amiga devices.
GUI Bloopers not only gives you a chuckle at some of the 'features' of PC and Mac programs, it will also prove to be a goldmine of information to Amiga shareware programmers with its insights into the way users love (and hate) to interact with computer software. So, whether you're going to write a piece of software or if you're just curious to find out what possesses programmers to include certain "usability howlers" in their creations, you need to read this book.
Originally reviewed in issue 13
by David Stroud.
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