Book Review: GUI Bloopers
By Christine Wiegand, SAP User Experience, SAP AG – May 21, 2003
This review takes a personal look at Jeff Johnson's book GUI Bloopers.
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Jeff Johnson Usability: UI Design |
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Review
Graphical User Interfaces look impressive at first sight but are often flawed with design mistakes. Jeff Johnson's book GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Do's for Software Developers and Web Designers describes the most common GUI design errors, is illustrated with examples from commercial software and Websites, and explains how to avoid them (Website).
At the CHI 2002 conference in Minneapolis, I took part in the "GUI Bloopers" tutorial with Jeff Johnson, which was based on his book. After an introductory chapter with general user interface design principles, the book describes seven kinds of Bloopers: GUI-Component, Layout and Appearance, Textual, Interaction, Web, Responsiveness, and Management.
GUI-component bloopers are erroneous decisions about how to use on-screen controls. One very common GUI-component blooper is confusing checkboxes with radiobuttons. Checkboxes are for independent on/off settings, while radiobuttons are for choosing one value from several possible values.
Layout and appearance bloopers are errors in arranging and presenting information and controls. One such blooper is displaying windows in odd areas of the computer screen. For example, one company had a software product that sometimes displayed new windows offscreen, where users could not see them.
Textual bloopers are poorly written text in software. The most common textual blooper is describing errors in terms that only programmers understand. For example, one web-based scheduling application displays the following message if you try to schedule two events for the same time: "Error 00001: unique constraint (PA_REPORT_HEADERS_U1) violated". Why not just: "You can't schedule two events for the same time."?
Interaction bloopers are violations of high-level design principles that make life difficult for software users. One such blooper is imposing arbitrary limits. How many person-hours have been wasted worldwide since 1980 by people who were trying to name documents and data-files in fewer than eight characters? Another common interaction blooper is: "Cancel button doesn't cancel."
Web bloopers are problems that are specific to websites and web-based applications. One common Web blooper is failing to mark links so that users can see whether they've already "been there, done that." Another blooper is Websites that unintentionally reveal a company's internal turf-battles.
Responsiveness bloopers are aspects of a product or service's design that interfere with users' work-pace. Most software doesn't give us enough feedback about what it is doing: Buttons that don't respond to clicks in the required 0.1 second (so we click them again), scrollbars that can't keep up with the mouse, or lengthy operations that don't indicate their progress or that can't be stopped before they finish.
Management bloopers are management-level mistakes that affect the usability and usefulness of software and electronic applications. Examples of such bloopers include: assigning important GUI components to novice programmers, entrusting the writing of error messages and other software text to programmers rather than to trained writers, and failing to reconcile differences in design of different parts of the same program.
In addition to describing the various kinds of design bloopers and how to avoid them, Jeff Johnson included user-interface reviews of two commercial software products, and a couple of "war-stories" describing his experiences as a consultant.
With this book, Jeff Johnson wants to help GUI designers and developers learn to produce better software.
It is an excellent, well-illustrated resource for anyone whose work touches on usability issues, including software engineers, Website designers, managers of development processes, and usability professionals.
There is only one criticism in my opinion: there are too many negative examples. I would have preferred having a few positive examples, not only bloopers and the corresponding design rules.
See also Web Bloopers, Jeff Johnson's newest book and a review.
