It's new and an in-depth description of the web site development of six organizations -- eBay, BBC News, evolt.org, SynFonts, Economist.com, and MetaFilter. It reminds me of Nielsen and Tahir's "Homepage Usability" book (see below), but it's from the point of view of the site makers. The book gives the reader a good sense of the tradeoffs faced when building and maintaining a site. The best chapter is the one on SynFonts -- it starts slow but the advice on user testing and to get a Mac and load it up with all different operating systems and monitor settings is priceless.

This is an absolute must read. Joel's website http://www.joelonsoftware.com/index.html has parts of the book online, but there is more here for the person interested in Human Computer Interface design. It makes sense and is fun to read. Joel's best advice: "Users can't read, and if they could they wouldn't want to". See Joel's website for lots of useful advice on programming and even how to hire and pay programmers.

A step-by-step look at a variety of websites. The start of the book has statistics on basic page layouts, which is helpful to see what average layouts look like. Then there is a section on 113 homepage usability guidelines. Each one offers something to think about for the homepage designer or webmaster. Fifty websites are then examined piece by piece. The serious web designer could go through this in fine detail to get ideas of what works and what doesn't.

Steve's book goes well with Joel's on "User Interface Design". It's also about user interface design and makes the point that the best rule for designing a website is to make it very easy for the user to get where he/she wants to go. That is, don't make me think! Steve's website is http://www.sensible.com/ and his company motto is “It's not rocket surgery.”(sm)

Norman argues that computers need to be built into tools that help us DO something, like electric motors are built into refrigerators and vacuums. We don't need to see the computer, to think about it, to have to update it all the time. Computers and their associated operating systems and programs are too complex, not user-friendly, and we have accepted this state of affairs as "normal" because we as consumers don't know any better and the computer industry is locked in a product evolution spiral that demands bigger and more complex, more features all the time, without actually making our tasks easier or more effectively completed. This book goes well with Cooper's "Inmates are running the asylum". I liked Chapter 11 on Disruptive Technologies, especially page 236 about why existing companies don't take new technologies seriously. The reasons: New technologies are usually inferior to existing ones; large companies require large business markets; returns seem greater on existing businesses than on new ones; reward systems are based on immediate profitability so managers focus on current products, not new ones; new products often cut across company divisions so inter-division politics can kill new ideas; and old products suck new ones into their gravity wells and destroy them. On the idea of disruptive technologies, see also Clayton Christensen's book "The Innovator's Dilemma" (reviewed in the "Books" section of my website).

This book is totally misnamed. It's big and full of information, really a history of computing and how computers work. It starts off with circuit design and how electrical circuits (he starts with flashlights) can be put together to add numbers and do Boolean operations. It's a sprawling epic and well worth the time.

This book is about interaction design. The point is made that writing code is like pouring concrete -- you wouldn't think of pouring a foundation for a house until the design was complete and the forms were built, but companies will happily let programmers start coding software without really knowing what a product is meant to do, what goals it will accomplish for the user. Once written, the code then hardens like concrete and it's then too late to work on the interaction design. Cooper calls most software "dancing bearware" because you marvel not at how well the bear dances (or the program works) but that it dances at all. I loved Chapter 7 on how programmers are like jocks (yes they are!) and their obsolete culture described in Chapter 8. The best part of the book is Chapter 9 about creating a user persona (a fake but detailed person who is the target for using the device or software) and thinking about their goals and how they would use the product. Another analogy that is really useful is comparing the creation of software to the making of a movie. We know that there's a lot of design work that goes into the movie before filming is done -- it should be like that in software too.

By the guru of web design. Lots of interesting information for web designers and those interested in Graphical User Interface, Human Computer Interface, and web usability. The best part of the book is Chapter 8 on the future of the Internet and associated businesses.

Makes the argument that software programmers need a space of their own so that they can have uninterrupted time to think and get in the "flow", the state where you are so involved in your work that you become unaware of the outside world. This is when complex thinking and coding gets done so the person's environment has to aid that process. It's a staple at Microsoft, which has used its advice in the construction of its programmer's workspaces. In Organizational Behavior this is part of Job Design but is underrated. We often talk about the psychological elements of how jobs are built and ignore the physical side of work -- privacy, noise, lighting, space, and air.

This book is about "how incompatibilities between the way things are designed and the way people perceive, think, and act can result in design-induced human error" (p. 9). It's 20 short stories written in chatty dialogue about when things went bad. Kind of depressing.

This book provides a sweeping coverage of unintended consequences in nature, medicine, the environment and the office and its computers. For example, the Law of Diminishing Specialization (page 208) shows how professionals now do their own typing, filing, and a lot of "help-desk" service for their peers, rather than doing the work at which they are specialists. So university professors do less professor work of teaching and research and more administrative work of typing and filing. Tenner's basic point is that people take well-intentioned action but there is usually a bite-back unintended consequence -- something happens we hadn't planned on. A recent example is Joel on Software's point that "paradoxically, even as we have higher and higher level programming tools with better and better abstractions, becoming a proficient programmer is getting harder and harder." http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html

In the introduction to this book, Tufte explains that his three books on information design have an order. This book, the third in the series, Visual Explanations, is about pictures of verbs: the representation of mechanism and motion, of process and dynamics, of causes and effects, of explanation and narrative. The second, Envisioning Information, is about pictures of nouns: maps and aerial photographs for example consist of a great many nouns lying on the ground. The first book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, is about pictures of numbers: how to depict data and enforce statistical honesty. Anyone interested in information design should make sure to read these three books.

This book is clearly a work of some significance, especially for anyone interested in cognitive engineering and the display of information. Particularly important to my mind is Tufte's analysis of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. He states (p. 39-40) "...in management schools, the accident serves as a case study for reflections about groupthink, technical decision-making in the face of political pressure, and bureaucratic failures to communicate. For the authors of engineering textbooks and for the physicist Richard Feynman, the Challenger accident simply confirmed what they already knew: awful consequences result when heroic engineers are ignored by villainous administrators. In the field of statistics, the accident is evoked to demonstrate the importance of risk assessment, data graphs, fitting models to data, and requiring students of engineering to attend classes in statistics. For sociologists, the accident is a symptom of structural history, bureaucracy, and conformity to organizational norms. Taken in small doses, the assorted interpretations of the launch decision are plausible and rarely mutually exclusive. But when all these accounts are considered together, the accident appears thoroughly overdetermined. It is hard to reconcile the sense of inevitable disaster embodied in the cumulated literature of post-accident hindsight with the experiences of the first 24 shuttle launches, which were distinctly successful."

His point is that the information for not launching the shuttle was there, and previous shuttles and other space flights had been delayed for various reasons. But the design of the information didn't allow the decision to not launch to be made.

"Unless management adopts an attitude that improving product and service is more important than making quick money, unless management decides to embrace a philosophy of pride in workmanship, unless management decides to break down the barriers to cooperation and teamwork, to cease rewarding managers not for producing goods properly but only for shipping them on time, quality cannot and will not be achieved." p. 158/159. This is a hefty book and it's only partly about software design. This book is more about management. It's also about designing software so that it can be easily used. Written in 1996 it's a bit dated but interesting to see how the predictions Tog makes have held up about computing and work in the future. Chapter 34 on magic is especially good. See Tog's website at http://www.asktog.com/

Tog on Interface (1992) is a collection of Apple Computer interface design newsletters. It seems more interesting to someone who really cares about the Macintosh and its development, which I don't.

The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media like Real People and Places (1996)
Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass

The title says it all. People's responses to media, including computer interfaces, are fundamentally social and natural. So design your interface as if you are designing a normal interaction between two people. The book is a summary of a large number of experiments that make this point.

People find it hard to understand that in complex systems an action may have unanticipated consequences, and that what works now may not work in the future since underlying conditions may have changed. If you're interested in complexity and how things go wrong in organizations, this book is worth a look.

A classic that shows how adding people to a software team when it is already late will in fact make the project even later. Adding a lot of people to a very late project can doom the project to failure.

When you first see this book you'll be stunned by how big it is, especially after reading Joel Spolsky's "User Interface Design for Programmers" and Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think". But there are good ideas aplenty here, almost one on every page. And it's really funny.

The irony about this book is that it was initially titled "The Psychology of Everyday Things" and it's about why things are so hard to use. It turns out that the books original title was too hard to use -- I suspect people just couldn't figure out what it meant. The message is that it's not just you, or me, but that everybody finds some things hard to use because they were poorly designed. The user interface just doesn't work in a lot of cases. At the start of the book, page viii, Norman makes a good example of the 3-mile Island nuclear meltdown, and that the problem was really one of interface design. 

The middle book of Tufte's trilogy on Information Design is a bit repetitive of the other two (I read it third) but still interesting with lots of good examples of how to create useful information displays. The best examples are the ones where he shows the original data display (chart, graph, etc.) and then redraws it to show how it could have been done better, usually much better. There's lots of good advice here for anyone who is in the business of creating and displaying information. A key point: "Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information". This is the same point made by Donald Norman in his "Design of Everyday Things". The overarching point is that very careful and thoughtful design -- of things, of information displays, of the human-computer interface on a web page or of a computer program -- pays off in usability and understanding. 

There are three error types: skill-based slips and lapses; rule-based mistakes; and knowledge-based mistakes. This book provides a theory of error. There are good cases in the Appendix on Three Mile Island, Bhopal, Challenger, Chernobyl, and the King's Cross Underground fire. 

This book is so funny and so good! For anyone with an interest in systems behavior, especially how and why things go wrong in systems, this is a great place to start. The book is full of little quotes and principle statements. I've put a short list here. Maybe the best one is a restatement of Le Chatelier's principle that SYSTEMS TEND TO OPPOSE THEIR OWN PROPER FUNCTIONS. And for fans of prototyping of computer systems: "A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work -- you have to start over, beginning with a working simple system" and "colossal systems foster colossal error".

I read the first edition, so I'm not sure how the second one has changed. This book is about how to show information. It's got a lot of very interesting examples. I liked this book a bit less than the third in the series, probably because I read this one second. Tufte makes the strong point that we should "give the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space". If you are in the business of presenting information then this book will help you understand information theory and both good and bad practice. I love his willingness to show bad design for what it is.