Usability

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Here are books of interest to interface designers and others working on usability. You might also want to have a look at our web design page.


1.		Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Appr to Web Usability, 2nd Edition from New Riders Press Price: $26.40 Customer Review: Great book that appears simple but really is a great foundation of web principles that you can always go back and refer to. It's a pretty quick read and is actually fun to go through if you're in this line of work.	Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0 Click here for more information


2.		Prioritizing Web Usability (VOICES) from New Riders Press Price: $31.50 Customer Review: If you don't yet know much about web usability, I would recommend this book (and it's predecessor) to you. If you are already keen on the idea of web usability, then you may want to skip the first book (it is a bit dated), and grab this one as a reference.	Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0 Click here for more information


3.		Handbook of Usability Testing: Howto Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests from Wiley Price: $37.80 Customer Review: Excellent reference for beginners and seasoned professionals alike. Would consider the book a staple in the library for anyone in practice.	Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5.0 Click here for more information


4.		Designing Web Usability (VOICES) from Peachpit Press Price: $34.64 Customer Review: You wont find anything in this book what general common sense already told you. Besides it's outoutdated and for this reason all examples are useless.	Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0 Click here for more information


5.		Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed (VOICES) from New Riders Press Price: $31.50 Customer Review: It was a while ago when I read this book, about 3 years ago and I still remember how extremely informational and what an eye opener it was to learn all sorts of content do's and don'ts along with the usability guidelines it has.	Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0 Click here for more information


6.		Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability from Wiley Price: $31.49 Customer Review: To be fair about this, I am not judging the content of the book, but the format of the book is horrific. The author presents concepts for implementing usable web design through a book that seems to ignor hundreds of years of proven usability principles for the printed word. Interesting design, or... more info	Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0 Click here for more information


7.		Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics (Interactive Technologies) (Interactive Technologies) from Morgan Kaufmann Price: $44.95 Customer Review: I had to take a stats course for my Masters in Human Computer Interaction; I had a hard time translating the concepts into an easy format that I could apply for usability testing. I search for days online and in the library for books or articles that explained these concepts with an experience... more info	Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5.0 Click here for more information


8.		Moderating Usability Tests: Principles and Practices for Interacting (Interactive Technologies) (Interactive Technologies) from Morgan Kaufmann Price: $35.95 Customer Review: It's one thing to moderate a usability test. It's another thing to do it right. In their book Dumas and Loring provide detailed discussions on the many nuances of interaction with participants during a usability test and a guide on how to maximize time with test participants. The book is well... more info	Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0 Click here for more information


9.		Usability Engineering (Interactive Technologies) from Morgan Kaufmann Price: $31.65 Customer Review: I'm not a usability expert, and this didn't quite match up with what I hoped to get out a of class on software evaluation for librarians (but that has more to do with the professor's slant on the subject and choice of book), but the book was easy to read and I felt that it covered some good points.... more info	Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0 Click here for more information


10.		Usability Testing and Research (Part of the Allyn & Bacon Series in Technical Communication) (Technical Communication) from Longman Price: $65.99 Customer Review: I'm frankly startled at the universally positive reviews for this book. As a full-time usability researcher and an alumnus of Apple's human interface technologies team, I felt this to be one of the worst books on usability I've ever read. I could not possibly recommend it for either academic or... more info	Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0 Click here for more information


11.		A Practical Guide to Usability Testing from Intellect Ltd Price: $31.50 Customer Review: I had Dumas (one of the authors) for a Testing & Analysis master level class at Bentley College (the semester before he retired; I wish I could have waited, so I actually would have gotten something for my 3000+). He was a horrible teacher, the worst in the program. Reminded me of Ferris... more info	Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0 Click here for more information


12.		Usability for the Web: Designing Web Sites that Work (Interactive Technologies) from Morgan Kaufmann Price: $70.51 Customer Review: This book contains a lot of usable usability practices that really works! You can get literally all the details of usability testing practices in this book, as well as how to run them. And good amount of pages are spent for user needs analysis and task analysis as the first steps explaining Web site... more info	Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0 Click here for more information


13.		Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests from Wiley Price: $44.28 Customer Review: I bought this for a class. While it's not very exciting, I suppose it's canononical for the subject area.	Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0 Click here for more information


14.		Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Sociability from Wiley Price: $63.00 Customer Review: The internet has changed a lot since this was written but it is still a good book on the basic concepts of Online Communities. I'm not sure if there is a better resource out there yet. I would hope the author would write another version to keep it up-to-date.	Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0 Click here for more information


15.		The Persona Lifecycle : Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies) (Interactive Technologies) from Morgan Kaufmann Price: $63.85 Customer Review: This book is full of handy processes. I have to say, you MUST be dedicated to building personas...and so does your organization. If you're just venturing into the space, you certainly find out what's possible. If this concept is new to your organization, I would recommend finding a way to... more info	Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0 Click here for more information


16.		Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human Computer Interaction (Interactive Technologies) from Morgan Kaufmann Price: $70.51 Customer Review: A very good book mainly focused on Scenario-Based analysis which you can actually use in every other subject and aspects of your life (even if you are choosing between trips). I bought this book as a text book for an HCI subject in VT and it was interesting to follow.	Customer Rating: 3.0 / 5.0 Click here for more information


17.		Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design from O'Reilly Media, Inc. Price: $32.97 Customer Review: This book is by far the best book that does for the User Interface world of computing what Edward R. Tufte's series of books does for the writer's of technical reports and their needs to present and represent many varied types of data and data interaction. Need to show the effects of miles marched,... more info	Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0 Click here for more information


18.		Cost-Justifying Usability, Second Edition: An Update for the Internet Age, Second Edition (Interactive Technologies) from Morgan Kaufmann Price: $62.05	Click here for more information


19.		An Introduction To Usability from CRC Price: $49.95 Customer Review: I bought a few copies of this book for new people who may not be related to our usability group but may need to understand what the disipline is all about. I thought it did a great job of teaching this topic to people who have never seen this stuff before. In fact the people who read it really... more info	Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0 Click here for more information


20.		The Usability Engineering Lifecycle: A Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design (Interactive Technologies) from Morgan Kaufmann Price: $75.41 Customer Review: This book is very well written, content-rich and provides a plethora of examples that I can use on the job immediately. What more can a software developer ask for? I would give it 10 stars if the option was available.	Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0 Click here for more information