I've been recommending this one to clients. Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers & Prospects into Leads will tell you how to make your web site work, be it to sell things or generate leads. You'll get great practical guidelines on site design, landing pages, forms, checkout processes, and more. Give this to your web designers and your producers.

 

 

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell - A fascinating examination of the different types of people that can cause things to happen. From the different types of people (Connectors, who know lots of people, and Mavens, who know lots of information and want to share it with you), to the "stickiness" of ideas, Gladwell explains the "idea as virus" theory of how things change in a very easy to read and entertaining fashion.

Flow : The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - "Flow" is what you are in when you are doing something that is both demanding and rewarding, when you lose track of time and are unaware of anything outside of your task, be it writing, programming, playing music, or even having an intense conversation with the right kind of people. Case studies and sometimes surprising tasks that involve flow make the book a fascinating read. It has changed the focus of several people to whom I've introduced the book.

Don't Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug - A former tech writer turned UI specialist -- no wonder I like him! Very good read, very easy to read, full of practical and common-sense ideas. A must read for any web designer but can easily be applied to any type of UI design.

Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed by Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir - This offers specific observations about 50 home pages and gives specific suggestions to improve usability. The first part of the book gives a concise overview of what Nielsen and Tahir suggest as guidelines, including hard statistics to back up these guidelines.

The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
Once you start thinking about software design, you start noticing design flaws (and wondrous designs!) in everyday items. For me, it was the ATM machines whose touchscreens broke every law of touchscreen design and made me bounce back and forth from the touchscreen to the keypad; then it was the coffeepot.

Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen
Focused exclusively on web sites, it's a must-read if that's what you are designing. Rather than seeing web sites merely as "static brochure", you will be challenged to think in terms of user tasks and how to make them easily accomplished via your design.

About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design  by Alan Cooper - Although focused on early Windows software, this is still on my "must-read" list. If you're moving from web sites to applications, it will be a tremendous help. I believe he's coming out with an updated edition, which I have not yet seen. But the original is quite worthwhile and valuable.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper - Inmates complements About Face (above) by focusing more on the requirements phase and business situations than on actual UI design widgets and such. Programmers may hate it--or be relieved that someone wants to take over the user-focused areas of design. Most of the ones I know recognized themselves as described in here and would love to produce better applications.

Bugs in Writing Revised: A Guide to Debugging Your Prose by Lyn Dupre - Amusing, entertaining—and educational! Whether you are writing technical specs, PRDs, user interface specs, or user documentation you need to be able to communicate clearly. Keep this book by your armchair and read it at your leisure in the evenings when you are not writing! You can skip around or read it sequentially and gain either way.

Human Factors for Technical Communicators by Marlana Coe - If you're in the writing field, you need to understand users to produce quality documentation, be it printed material or online help. Thinking like a designer rather than a writer at times, will help you step back and design your documentation in ways that help your user in different ways than you might otherwise have been able to accomplish.

Software Project Survival Guide by Steve McConnell - Programmers probably know Steve McConnell from his Code Complete or Rapid Development. This book is aimed at technical leads and project managers, with "3 to 25 team members and schedules of 3 to 18 months." As with most things, "your mileage may vary." I would counterbalance this with something like Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck and take what works for you in your environment.

Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck - Agile programming is, of course, the hot "new" topic that's been around for quite a few years but suddenly getting the buzz. Who hasn't worked on a project whose requirements were nailed down tightly, changed only via change board to eliminate missed budgets and deadlines, only to find the market or technical platform or business needs had changed during development and the project was nearly worthless? Countering that, who hasn't worked on a project where things were never defined and constantly fluid, and the project floundered due to ill-conceived needs, rapidly changing requirements, out of date specs? Read this and Software Project Survival Guide by Steve McConnell (above) and take what works for you from both.

 

AntiPatterns: Refactoring Software, Architectures, and Projects in Crisis by William H. Brown, et al - Everyone's heard of design patterns but in addition to recognizing what should be repeated, we should all learn what not to repeat as well! This is not aimed at developers but at project managers and technical leads. It will not help you write better code! It will help you avoid problem situations in projects and perhaps actually get the software out the door!

Becoming a Technical Leaders by Gerald M. Weinberg - I've loved everything I've read by Weinberg and plan on continuing my way through his books. This is a book of self-exploration and will open your eyes to seeing situations and people from a new angle. It focuses on the personal side of being a leader; it's not a cookbook of directions. The stories and examples are entertaining as well as educational. They will stick in your mind and pop up at appropriate times with those "Aha!" moments when you truly learn something.

Exploring Requirements : Quality Before Design by Donald C. Gause and Gerald M. Weinberg. - Again, I've never read a book by Weinberg I didn't like. (See Becoming a Technical Leaders above.) Focused on understanding people in order to create good requirements, the anecdotes ring true and add a tremendous amount to the book. This is not a dry "how to write requirements" book and I venture to guess you will learn far more than that, although you will learn how to write requirements as well.

User and Task Analysis for Interface Design by JoAnn T. Hackos, et al - Focused on helping you understand task analysis in great detail, you will come away from this book with a good understanding of how important it is to understand the user and their tasks. I don't rank it highly in terms of "interface design" tips but if you're designing the wrong things, you're still going to have a lousy piece of software. Use this to help you stay focused and analyze the user. Use the design books above for learning how to create the UI design that will be the expression of the user needs.

 

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