Joel on Software

Great Design - Table of Contents

Articles in gray are still being written. Many of these articles are derived from chapters in User Interface Design for Programmers.

(* = first draft)

Introduction

Introduction to Great Design*
What is Design?*
What Makes It Great?*

Good Design

User Model vs. Program Model
Choices
Affordances and Metaphors
Broken Metaphors
Consistency and Hobgoblins
Modes
Put users in control
Design for Extremes
Users don't read
Users can't control the mouse
Users can't remember anything
Activity Based Design
Usability Testing
Relativity (UI Time Warps)
How Do It Know?
Tricks of the Trade
UIs that Kill
Beta Testing
The Onion in the Varnish
Information Design / Answering the Right Question
Shipping is a Feature

Great Design

Introduction to Black Magic of Great Design
Aesthetics
Emotional Design
Designing the Social Interface
Building Communities
Obsessive Attention to Detail
Taking Things Away
Playing with Fire (making things worse)
User happiness vs. user success

Have you been wondering about Distributed Version Control? I wrote a tutorial for my favorite DVCS, Mercurial. It’s called Hg Init—check it out!

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You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make FogBugz, an enlightened project management system designed to help great teams develop brilliant software, Kiln, which provides distributed version control and code reviews, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop access easy. I’m also the co-founder of Stack Overflow.