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Title:
Books About Usability
Review:
Books are the best way to learn about usability, for two reasons.
First, usability changes much more slowly than other computer topics because it relates to humans and not to technology. This means that the advice found in books continues to hold for decades after they were published. For example, many people still think that the best introductory book about usability is "The Design of Everyday Things" by my business partner Donald A. Norman, even though Don wrote his book back in 1988. In contrast, books about the latest programming tricks are obsolete before they ever roll off the printer.
Second, usability requires book-length exposition to get beyond the surface. When you read a short usability essay on the web, your reaction is probably, 'That's obvious'. Well, if usability were that obvious, then why are most websites so bad? It's true that any individual usability observation is obvious, once it's pointed out, because usability is about simplification. But the full impact of usability requires a good deal of conceptual thinking and appropriate study methodology.
I certainly know that my best work is not found on my website. The web is great for polemics, news items and short summaries, but my books and book-length reports are the place to look for deeper insights and the full list of guidelines you need to know for practical design projects.
As another example of the superiority of books for learning, a study from the Open University found that:
- every GBP 100 spent on books raises students' grades by 1.5% * every GBP 100 spent on computers raises students' grades by 0.7%
Hopefully, I have now motivated you to buy some books if you want to learn about usability. Here are some I recommend (besides my own, of course):
- "Information Foraging: A Theory of Adaptive Interaction with Information", by Peter Pirolli (Oxford University Press, 2006)
This is by far the most important book about web usability because it explains why users behave the way they do, and why they spend so little time on each web page. This book has not been published yet (I read a preview manuscript), but you can pre-order it. Warning: as the subtitle says, this is a theoretical book, so it doesn't contain any design guidelines, only the background concepts you need to think about the web.
- "Letting Go of the Words: Writing web Content that Works", by Janice Redish (Morgan Kaufmann, 2006)
This book also hasn't been published yet, but you can pre-order it. How to write for the web by writing less.
- "Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques", by Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano (Prentice Hall, 1994)
A great example of the fact that old usability books are often the best. Explains all the principles you need to know to understand visual design in interactive environments. Will not make you a graphic artist, but will give you the vocabulary to request what you need from your graphics people.
- "GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Do's for Software Developers and web Designers", by Jeff Johnson (Morgan Kaufmann, 2000)
This is mainly relevant if you develop applications or other designs that are oriented toward functionality rather than information. For such designs, please heed the lessons from decades of application usability projects, as summarised in this book.
- "Maximum Accessibility: Making Your web Site More Usable for Everyone", by John M. Slatin and Sharron Rush (Addison-Wesley, 2002)
I like this better than other accessibility books because it views accessibility as a matter of actual usage by customers who happen to have disabilities. Filled with case studies of how real people browse sites with screen readers.
- "Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human- Computer Interaction", by Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant (Addison Wesley, 2004)
Anything that's not covered elsewhere is probably somewhere in this 672-page brick of a textbook. A good summary of all the many things that are known about how people use computers.
Free Pint Reviewer:
Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is principal of Nielsen Norman Group. His newest book is Prioritizing Web Usability (see for a detailed table of contents).
Dr. Nielsen also wrote the best-selling book "Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity", which has sold more than a quarter of a million copies in 22 languages. His other books include "Usability Engineering", "Usability Inspection Methods", "International User Interfaces", and "Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed". Dr. Nielsen's Alertbox column on web usability has been published on the Internet since 1995 and currently has about 200,000 readers at . niques to support organisations to manage risk more effectively..
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