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User Interface Design For Programmers
By Joel Spolsky
October 24, 2001

Chapter 1: Controlling Your Environment Makes You Happy
Most of the hard core C++ programmers I know hate user interface programming. This surprises me,
because I find UI programming to be quintessentially easy, straightforward, and fun.
It's easy because you usually don'tneed algorithms more sophisticated than how to center one
rectangle in another. It's straightforward because when you make a mistake, you immediately see it
and can correct it. It's fun, because the results of your work are immediately visible. You feel like you
are sculpting the program directly.
I think most programmers' fear of UI programming comes from their fear of doing UI design. Theythink that UI design is like graphics design: the mysterious process by which creative, latte-drinking,
all-dressed-in-black people with interesting piercings produce cool looking artistic stuff.
Programmers see themselves as analytic, logical thinkers: strong at reasoning, weak on artistic
judgment. So they think they can't do UI design.
Actually, I’ve found UI design to be quite easy andquite rational. It’s not a mysterious matter that
requires a degree from an art school and a penchant for neon-purple hair. There is a rational way to
think about user interfaces with some simple, logical rules that you can apply anywhere to improve
the interfaces of the programs you work on.
I'm not going to give you "Zen and the Art of UI Design". It's not art, it's not Buddhism, it's just aset
of rules. A way of thinking rationally and methodically. This book is designed for programmers. I
assume you don't need instructions for how to make a menu bar; rather, you need to think about
what to put in your menu bar (or whether to have one at all). There is one primary axiom I'll teach
you which guides all good UI design, and it's not hard to understand at all.
My first real job wasin a big, industrial bakery. The bakery was designed to have six bread
production lines. For every two production lines, there was a dough mixer, which produced 180 kg
lumps of dough that could be dumped to the left or the right:

Well, this was the design. In reality, Mixer C hadn't been built yet, nor had lines 3 or 5. So the
arrangement was:

Alert readers will be wondering, "how didthe dough get from Mixer B to production line 6?" Well,
that's where Wee Joel came in. My job, if you can believe this, was to stand on the left of Mixer B,
then catch the giant 180 kg lumps of dough as they flew out of the mixer in a big bathtub-withwheels, then roll the bathtub over to production line 6, and, using a winch-like device, heave the
dough onto line 6. I had to do this once everyten minutes, from about 10 PM until 4 AM.
There were other complications. Line 6 couldn't really handle 180 kg of dough all at once, so I had to
slice it with a giant knife into about 10 pieces. I don't even want to go into how absurdly difficult that
was.
The first few days, of course, I was terrible at this job. It seemed nearly impossible. Every bone in my
body ached. My blisters hadblisters. I had aches in places where I didn't know I had places.
At first I just couldn't keep line 6 supplied with dough. Every time they had an interruption in the
dough, this caused a big gap on the assembly line. When the gap rolled into the oven, the oven

(expending a constant amount of energy over a reduced amount of dough) started to heat up more,
which burnt the bread. Sometimes, line 6would get gummed up and stop production, but the mixer
went right on ahead producing dough for me, and I would run the risk of running out of bathtubswith-wheels to store the dough in. When this happened, I actually had to clean and oil the floor and
dump the dough on the floor to be scraped up later. Not that this would work very well, because if the
dough got older than about 30 minutes it...