Books on Usability

Here’s a great listing of books on Usability. Here are some books I highly recommend from the list:

Universal Principles of Design: 100 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach Through Design, by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler (buy in the U.S. or buy in the U.K.)
As the title says: a description of a hundred basic principles of usability and design. Few of these will be new to you, but it’s good to have them collected in one place with simple description and a few illustrative examples of each principle. Serves as a nice checklist to read through as you are thinking about the usability of a design problem. For example, one technique is “highlighting”: the book gives the guideline to highlight no more than 10% of the information and lists five common ways to highlight (bold, different typeface, color, inverting, and blinking). Reading this short description may give rise to the following questions about your design: Did we highlight something that users should be directed to give special attention? Did we highlight too much? Did we use the best highlighting technique for the context, or should we use one of the others?

The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman (buy in the U.S. or buy in the U.K.)
This book is the best introduction to the importance of usability in design: much of the value comes from the fact that it is not about computers but about all kinds of other things that we suffer from every day (even nerds can identify with the examples in this book, though they usually claim that “well, typing mumble-foo-META-F4 is not that hard to remember” when confronted with an example of bad user interface design). This is the paperback edition. The hardcover edition was entitled The Psychology of Everyday Things, leading to the often-cited acronym POET. The two editions are the same despite the different titles.

Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things, by Donald A. Norman (buy in the U.S. or buy in the U.K.)
Don Norman presents his theory of the three levels at which people engage with designs: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. Many traditional appearance designers have focused on the visceral level, usability has traditionally been strongest at the behavioral level, and many marketing experts have focused on the branding aspects of reflective design (while ignoring other angels of how people think about their personal history of using products). Norman brings it all together in a unified theory of design. The book is the most useful for readers who are designing physical objects where the visceral level has more dimensions to work with and where users also get more time to engage the reflective level. Web design is more dominated by the behavioral level, but the other two certainly matter as well.

Usability Engineering, by Jakob Nielsen (revised paperback edition). Buy from Amazon USA or buy from Amazon U.K.
Basic textbook that covers the entire usability engineering lifecycle from early product conceptualization through design and evaluation to field installation and follow-up studies. This book focuses on the practical methods that can be applied at each step with a particular emphasis on “discount usability engineering” methods that can be used despite the most severe deadlines and budget restraints. The full table of contents is online