# GUI bloopers

I’ve just been reading Jeff Johnson’s book GUI bloopers.

I wish I’d read this book when it first came out in 2000. Instead of telling the developers of Mozilla Composer’s (now defunct) image map editor that “Dialogs should never, never, have menus”, I could have just said: “That’s Blooper 5!” Instead of explaining in great detail to Netscape Mail’s interface designer that her designs were overusing group boxes, I could have just said: “That’s Blooper 23!” Yeah, okay, it might have been even less effective than what I did say, but damn it would have been fun.

And how pleasant to find, on page 27, the “Save” command in computer software described as “an extraneous concept”. Quite.

Posted on 4/18/04; 10:32:10 AM