43 Excellent Usability and Interface Design Books

by Chris on April 7, 2009

usabilityIf you want your site to reach its full potential it’s important that you have an understanding of how your visitors interact with it. Making your site easy to use can have a massive effect on conversions, sales or whatever goals you may have.

Here are a selection of excellent books covering the subject of usability and interaction design to get you started:


About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design

by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann David Cronin

Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Site

by PJ Lynch

Constructing Accessible Web Sites

by Jim Thatcher

Cost-Justifying Usability

by Randolph G. Bias and Deborah J. Mayhew

Defensive Design for the Web

by 37signals, Matthew Linderman, Jason Fried

Deliver First Class Web Sites: 101 Essential Checklists

by Shirley Kaiser

Designing Easy-to-use Web Sites: A Hands-on Approach to Structuring Successful Websites

by Vanessa Donnelly

Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices

by Dan Saffer

Designing Interactions

by B Moggridge

Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design

by Jenifer Tidwell

Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design

by Robert Hoekman

Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction

by Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant

Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques

by Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano

Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

by Steve Krug

Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things

by Donald A Norman

Envisioning Information

by Edward R. Tufte

Handbook of Usability Testing: Howto Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests

by Jared Spool, Jeffrey Rubin, Dana Chisnell

Handheld Usability

by Scott Weiss

Human Factors in Product Design: Current Practice and Future Trends

by W. Green, Patrick W Jordan, Patrick W. Jordan

Information Visualization: Design for Interaction

by Prof Robert Spence

Human-Computer Interaction: Concepts And Design

by J. Preece, Y. Rogers, H. Sharp, D. Benyon, S. Holland, T. Carey

Prioritizing Web Usability

by Jakob Nielson and Hola Loranger

Readings in Human-Computer Interaction: Toward the Year 2000

by Saul Greenberg

Shaping Web Usability: Interaction Design in Context

by Albert N. Badre

Submit Now: Designing Persuasive Web Sites

by Andrew Chak

The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm

by Tom Kelley, Jonathan Littman, Tom Peters

The Design of Everyday Things

by Donald A. Norman

Human-Computer Interaction Fundamentals

by Andrew Sears, Julie A. Jacko

The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems

by Jef Raskin

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum:
Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

by Alan Cooper

Non-Designer’s Design Book

by Robin Williams

Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed

by Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir

Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology

by Jonas Löwgren and Erik Stolterman

The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Web Sites

by Douglas K. van Duyne, James A. Landay, and Jason I. Hong

Usability Engineering (Interactive Technologies)

by Jakob Nielsen (Paperback – Sep 23, 1993)

The Usability Engineering Lifecycle: A Practitioner’s Handbook for User Interface Design

by Deborah J. Mayhew

Usability for the Web: Designing Web Sites that Work

by Tom Brinck, Darren Gergle, and Scott D. Wood

User Interface Design: A Software Engineering Perspective

by Soren Lauesen

User Interface Design for Mere Mortals

by Eric Butow

Web Application Design Handbook: Best Practices for Web-Based Software

by Susan Fowler and Victor Stanwick

Web Bloopers: 60 Common Web Design Mistakes, and How to Avoid Them

by Jeff Johnson

Web ReDesign 2.0: Workflow that Works

by Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler

Web Site Usability: A Designer’s Guide

by Jared M Spool, Tara Scanlon

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

Tim April 16, 2009 at 9:15 pm

excellent, thanks for the list, will keep going for a while!

Jared M. Spool April 23, 2009 at 4:51 pm

Nice list!

For the record, I wasn’t the author on the Handbook of Usability Testing. Jeff Rubin and Dana Chisnell did all the heavy lifting. I just wrote the foreword.

Jared

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