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... is a great book by Steve Krug (no connection, just a satisfied reader). He advocates *very* simple usability testing and gives practical advice on how to do it in Chapter 9: "Usability testing on 10 cents a day". I've followed the advice given and it worked well. Like the useit.com suggestions above, Krug's site is useful too: http://www.sensible.com/

What are the issues in designing an interface that is clean, easy to understand, and easy to use? What are things to be considered? What are things to be avoided? What are good over-all philosophies of UI design? Reading the questions posted, I'd recommend becoming familiar with the broader principles that inform nearly any sort of design; then narrow your reading and research to specific GUI-oriented design. Developing a healthy sense and understanding for what makes an effective user experience is important to any sort of consumer design work (and effective UI design definitely is about understanding your consumer/target audience); "usability" as a discipline has yielded to the larger field of Experience Design (XD) as a key area of study for GUI-designers. Let's start from the 10,000-foot view: Books I'd recommend for your conceptual skills are: --Bill Buxton's *Sketching User Experiences: Getting the design right and the right design*. Bill's background at Xerox PARC and later at SGI/Alias|Wavefront (creators of the Maya 3D CGI software, among others) have made him a pretty revered figure in the industry. This book's a terrific primer on the process of thinking about design. --The upcoming O'Reilly release, written by Adaptive Path, *Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World*. What's the distinction between product and service? Adaptive Path--the outfit from which came Jesse James Garrett's seminal white paper on Ajax three years ago--started thinking about this as they examined the success of the iTunes and iPod experience; the book grew from there. Moving down to 5,000 feet: For best-practices from the usability perspective (hey, an easy-to-use site usually has a well-designed GUI), it's hard to beat the two canonical books: --Steve Krug's *Don't Make Me Think!* (now in its second edition) --Jakob Nielsen's *Designing Web Usability* Both books arrived as website usability emerged as the successor to the David Siegel School of "third generation web design" in the late 90's. Nielsen codified usability best practices through a research-intensive method, and Krug made usability accessible for the creatives who thought Nielsen a bit pedantic. Solid, foundational material that hasn't needed radical revising in nearly 10 years. Ground-level: Here's where you and/or your team go to work, and I heartily recommend you check out another O'Reilly title, *Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design*, by Jenifer Tidwell. There are several solid tutorials out there on in-the-trenches GUI design, but I've still seen nothing as effective as this one. Hoping this helps, --Steve Weiss Executive Editor O'Reilly Media Links: http://www.billbuxton.com/ http://adaptivepath.com/ http://www.useit.com/ http://www.sensible.com/ http://jtidwell.net/

If you want a quick overview, that even your manager (might) understand, see Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug

It doesn't go too in-depth on stuff, but it'll give you general concepts to consider, and is a generally fun read. It's the first book I typically give to folks new to UI design.

Also, consider reading Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug.

Whoa. That's some advanced sheot!

It's hard-core science, too. Look at the scientifical results:

The report stated, "Some changes in muscle tension were quite dramatic While this was happening, the participants faces also tensed visibly, with the teeth clenched together and the muscles around the mouth becoming taught. These are physically uncomfortable situations that reduce concentration and increase feelings of anger."

I'm surprised that nobody has ever done anything like this before!

This is probably an excellent resource, but at this point it is one of many. The persistent problem is not developers, but clients. Internal or external, it doesn't matter. When marketing managers and O-level executives have a resource that tells them that they need to stop making decisions based on what their favorite colors are, or what websites their kids like to visit, we'll all be better off. In the mean time, at least there's Don't Make Me Think. But if the decisionmakers who have the pursestrings don't know what they're doing, a lot of the best practices advocated by developers never sees the light of day.

I can't believe this guy is a design/usability guru.

An oversimplification of his position, I'm sure, but that's the impression he gives. As you say, it doesn't help that his homepage is an oil spill of inscrutable links, an assault on the senses.

Jakob is a great pundit but I think he's becoming aware of the fact that most of the sage advice he compiled almost a decade ago has becoming common sense. Aside from getting interviews he hasn't really contributed anything new or exciting to web usability. First the design community figured this out and stopped buying his books, and I think now those designers' bosses are starting to realize that the $5k they spent sending their people to Nielsen conferences would be better spent on talking to their customers and doing more testing [and doing it themselves cheaply instead of hiring NN Group to do it].

It's nice to have a face for your industry but I'd really rather see someone like Steve Krug, Luke Wroblewski or Jennifer Tidwell who have done more than design a pre-Cambrian version of Sun's website and a bunch of pie-in-the-sky concept projects. The fact of the matter is that "real artists ship".

I'd like to say something clever, but... ah... oh, well, don't make me think... http://www.sensible.com/buythebook.html