Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, Quick Read, Must Read
Review: This book provides a great overview of interface design principles. At the same time, it is easy and entertaining to read. It is perfect reading material for a few hours in the evening or over the weekend, without committing to reading 1000 pages of theoretical know-how. This one you can get done with in a few short hours!
Rating:
Summary: A book to get you thinking
Review: This book won't tell you everything to know about UI design, but what it does tell you will make your interfaces better. It's a quick but entirely worthwhile read if you're new to the topic.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Book!
Review: This book, based on the articles Joel wrote and published... . is an excellent, no-nonsense, down to earth treatment of the subject.You'll find useful information on: - Figuring out what people really need and want (even if they don't know themselves) - How to design software that give people what they need and want - Understanding how to make the functionality of your software obvious to the majority of your users - Why making software too configurable is bad And other topics that most programmers don't spend enough time thinking about. The parts that really bring it home to me are the examples that use Joel's former employer (Juno) to demonstrate where things go wrong. Often they give me a sense of "Been there. Done that. Oh, so that's what I should have done!" All in all, a really good book, and while you may not agree with all of what he says, at least you'll be thinking about the problems he presents from a user's perspective.
Rating: 
Summary: Well... It *was* fun to read
Review: This is a great book if you're someone who knows little about UI Design. If you've been around UIs for a bit, then stay away, you'll find it to be a waste of time. The author explains basic concepts of UI design and provides an example or two. He does a good job at explaining his simple concepts, so this book might be a great way to start with IU design. Mr. Spolsky makes the book lots of fun to read by including entertaining, yet educational, anecdotes. The book is a bathroom-read... buy it an read a chapter or two in letrine. :) The book was ok, but I was expecting more substance.
Rating:
Summary: Subjective opinions, but educated ones
Review: This is not a prescriptive book--Alan Cooper's About Face offers a more detailed cookbook. I found it similar to Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things. One fact in the book's favor is that all but 7 new chapters are available for free online at [Web site], and there are many more essays by the author at [Web site]. His insights are the result of a career in shrink-wrapped software, but his wit and accessible writing style are his own. As a professional programmer, I found myself agreeing and laughing in equal parts.
Rating:
Summary: Funny and Instructive at the same time....
Review: This is one of the best books I have read in a long time. Joel Spolsky nails it when he talks about User Interfaces, Operating System quirks, Software Interfaces or Web Interfaces. All the while making the reading entertaining and instructive. If you consider yourself a software engineer "engineering software for human beings to use" you need to read this book! Joel provides a refreshingly agnostic (not very religious about a particular OS or a vendor-oriented way of doing things) fair assessment of how interfaces do things well as as screw up badly. Excellent book to read and follow!
Rating:
Summary: A must-read for every software designer
Review: UI Design for Programmers is an excellent guide to creating intuitive, usable software interfaces for the real world. The light tone and frequent anecdotes make it a pleasure to read, I finished the book the day after it arrived. Very refreshing compared to the dry, technical style of most other computer books. I would highly recommend it to anyone who designs interfaces for any type of software or web-based application.
Rating:
Summary: It¿s a good book, but falls short.
Review: User Interface Design is a topic which I have always been interested in. I believe it was PCWorld Magazine that used to have a column dedicated to improving the design of a submitted interface, and there were many things I learned from that column. This book seems to work from the basis of that column, but doesn't go as far as I would have liked it to. There are many anecdotes included in the book, and they were very illustrative as to the problems people encounter when working with a badly designed interface. I especially liked the concept of the mile-high menu bar that Mac users have, and how that compares to the small footprint that a Windows user must target to open a menu. Still, I was left wanting more. The book serves as a great introduction, but if you're already done some UI Design, you might already be familiar with most of what is explained in the book. The anecdotes are what really make the book appealing, but I wouldn't recommend purchasing the book just for those. It's a good book, it just falls short of what it could have been.
Rating: 
Summary: A must read.....not for the graphics minded though
Review: When you press the brakes of a car...you dont get a little dialog box that pops up and says " Stop Now? (Yes/No)"...or do you?
Aren't we really happy that everything is not really based on windows (as yet). When i picked up this book (well...got it as an Xmas present), I expected it to be more from a graphical perspective. But it was not to be. The small size of the book and its author certainly persuaded me to go ahead and read the book...and seriously...it was worth my time. To summarize:
- Not always really sensible to write a windows based program which completely contradicts the way Microsoft places controls on the form.
- While designing web-programs, try minimizing frequent trips to the server...(some apps do it even now ... damn). Use applets dude.
- Know thy user......damn......Joel presents so many examples of how stuff should not be made.
- While designing UI's for users, creativity should take the back-seat and "common-sense and intuition" takes the drivers seat.
- Users are duh....really..so...design for duh people.
- And for the myths vs facts (my favs)
- Flash sucks and kills the web-page ... Joel says YES....so do I
- Frames are stupid and are misleading ... I agree ...and so does Joel.
- And I disagree with one thing....Color coding does not really help. I am tempted to say that color coding is a matter of user-preference....(considering that you are not too color-bling)...and it certainly helps to have color coding for stuff you use on a daily basis. Maybe...its for the overly-organized folks...but still....if someone is trying to use a computer for something other than games,movies or programming, he/she is using it for organizing stuff...period.
Overall...an excellent read....
My rating for the book.....Four on Five.
Rating:
Summary: Fun to read!
Review: While this book is not in the usual sense a tutorial or a reference manual, it instructs and I will refer to it when creating user interfaces. This book is like a collection of short essays that are fun to read around a common theme, how to create good user interfaces. The overall effect is to modify the programmer's philosophy about user interfaces. I am stilling mulling over a lot what Joel has to say. Although the book is rather short, it covers it subject rather well. There are no exact formulas for creating great user interfaces. Rather, the author gives some guidelines to consider when developing. They explained and accompanied with full color examples that illustrate the author's point from actual applications. Many readers may think that these guidelines are just common sense, but after using numerous applications and websites, it may not be that common after all. Read the book, the consumers of your application may thank you afterwards.
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