Books on Usability

Usability

Using screen shots, cartoons, diagrams, and sidebars, this book offers a humorous take on the important subject of web usability.

User-Centered Design

The Handbook of Human Factors in Web Design covers basic human factors issues relating to screen design, input devices, and information organization and processing, as well as addresses newer features which will become prominent in the next generation of Web technologies. These include multimodal interfaces, wireless capabilities, and agents that can improve convenience and usability. Written by leading researchers and/or practitioners in the field, this volume reflects the varied backgrounds and interests of individuals involved in all aspects of human factors and Web design and includes chapters on a full range of topics.

User-Centered Design

One hidden factor powerfully influences the way users react to your software, hardware, User Interfaces (UI), or web applications: how those systems utilize users’ time. Now, drawing on the nearly 40 years of human computer interaction research–including his own pioneering work–Dr. Steven Seow presents state-of-the-art best practices for reflecting users’ subjective perceptions of time in your applications and hardware.

User-Centered Design

There is no single methodology for creating the perfect product–buy you can increase your odds. One of the best ways is to understand users’ reasons for doing things. Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior gives you the tools to help you grasp, and design for, those reasons. Adaptive Path co-founder Indi Young has written a roll-up-your-sleeves book for designers, managers, and anyone else interested in making design strategic, and successful.

User-Centered Design

Understanding Your Users is an easy to read, easy to implement, how-to guide on usability in the real world. It focuses on the “user requirements gathering” stage of product development and it provides a variety of techniques, many of which may be new to usability professionals. For each technique, readers will learn how to prepare for and conduct the activity, as well as analyze and present the data —all in a practical and hands-on way. In addition, each method presented provides different information about the user and their requirements (e.g., functional requirements, information architecture, task flows). The techniques can be used together to form a complete picture of the users’ requirements or they can be used separately to address specific product questions.

User-Centered Design

“The best basis around for user-centered interaction design, both as a primer for students as an introduction to the field, and as a resource for research practitioners to fall back on. It should be labelled ‘start here’.”

—Pieter Jan Stappers, ID-StudioLab, Delft University of Technology

User-Centered Design

Filled with real-world experience and a wealth of practical information, this book presents a complete toolbox of techniques to help designers and developers see through the eyes of their users. It provides in-depth coverage of 13 user experience research techniques that will provide a basis for developing better products, whether they’re Web, software or mobile based. In addition, it’s written with an understanding of how software is developed in the real world, taking tight budgets, short schedules, and existing processes into account.

User-Centered Design

This book cuts through the theory and gives hand-on advice to those who are seeking to actually conduct a focus group. It is most helpful for conducting focus groups for research or evaluation with public, non-profit, educational, health, human service, and religious organizations.

User-Centered Design

Most discussion about Web design seems to focus on the creative process, yet turning concept into reality requires a strong set of deliverables—the documentation (concept model, site maps, usability reports, and more) that serves as the primary communication tool between designers and customers. Here at last is a guide devoted to just that topic. Combining quick tips for improving deliverables with in-depth discussions of presentation and risk mitigation techniques, author Dan Brown shows you how to make the documentation you’re required to provide into the most efficient communications tool possible. He begins with an introductory section about deliverables and their place in the overall process, and then delves into to the different types of deliverables. From usability reports to project plans, content maps, flow charts, wireframes, site maps, and more, each chapter includes a contents checklist, presentation strategy, maintenance strategy, a description of the development process and the deliverable’s impact on the project, and more.

Usability

This is a great book to introduce people to information architecture. The book includes chapters on organization, labeling, navigation, searching, thesauri, controlled vocabularies, and metadata.

Usability

Forms make or break the most crucial online interactions: checkout, registration, and any task requiring information entry. In Web Form Design, Luke Wroblewski draws on original research, his considerable experience at Yahoo! and eBay, and the perspectives of many of the field’s leading designers to show you everything you need to know about designing effective and engaging web forms.

Usability

In 2000, Jakob Nielsen, the world’s leading expert on Web usability, published a book that changed how people think about the Web—Designing Web Usability (New Riders). Many applauded. A few jeered. But everyone listened. The best-selling usability guru is back and has revisited his classic guide, joined forces with Web usability consultant Hoa Loranger, and created an updated companion book that covers the essential changes to the Web and usability today. Prioritizing Web Usability is the guide for anyone who wants to take their Web site(s) to next level and make usability a priority! Through the authors’ wisdom, experience, and hundreds of real-world user tests and contemporary Web site critiques, you’ll learn about site design, user experience and usability testing, navigation and search capabilities, old guidelines and prioritizing usability issues, page design and layout, content design, and more!

Usability

Treats web usability as a practical and realizable business goal, not a buzzword or abstraction. It teaches you the concepts and skills you will need to know to produce cohesive, easy-to-use web sites while meeting tight deadlines and staying on budget.

Usability

A practical book with step-by-step guidelines for conducting a variety of usability tests. Topics covered include, writing, user-interface design, graphic design, engineering, and more.

Usability Return on Investment

Offers structured techniques for usability engineers and project managers to quantify the costs and benefits of a new product.

Usability

This book sets out web design precepts for developers to follow based on statistics (survey results on sizes of screens, types of queries submitted to search portals, response times by connection type) supporting Nielsen’s views on web usability.

Usability

A pragmatic approach to the user interface design process, emphasizing his heuristic evaluation technique.