
Recommended Reading
Few, Stephen, Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data, 2006
Show’s how you can take large amounts of complex information and present it “at a glance”. Few advises appropriate use of color and graphics. The very useful “bullet graph” is also recommended here.
*
Krug, Steve, Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2005
If I could give someone only one book for creating usable websites this is it. I’d recommend this especially for people who work in a field other than usability and design. Here’s the authors website- http://www.sensible.com/
*
Rosenfeld, Louis and Morville, Peter. Information architecture for the World Wide Web, 2007
A must have reference, especially for professionals involved with large websites and huge amounts of information.
*
Norman, Donald. Emotional design : why we love (or hate) everyday things, 2005
For those left brained people who think aesthetics & emotions do not impact usability. Authors website: www.jnd.org
For the serious User Experience professional I recommend all of Don Norman’s books.
*
Cooper, Reimann and Cronin, About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design, 2007
Methods, deliverables and IxD details. A great book!
*
Kuniavsky, Mike, Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research, 2003
A helpful research guide, filled with examples.
*
Saffer, Dan, Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices, 2006
A great overview of IxD.
Books that are more historical:
Moggridge, Bill, Designing Interactions, 2007
A history about inventors of everything HCI from Doug Engelbart’s mouse on. The last chapter has great ideas from IDEO about how to design. www.designinginteractions.com
*
Battelle, John, The search : how Google and its rivals rewrote the rules of business and transformed our culture, 2005
This book tells what happened to Infoseek & Excite, who bought who, explains how search works, that a googol is a 1 followed by 100 zeros, about black hat and white hat SEO, and the future of search. I loved it.