User Interface Books

Last updated September, 1998

The following are the books that I've found most useful.

The top honor goes to Alan Cooper for his book About Face. Alan's book is wonderful, very current (well, as of 1995), and filled with practical suggestions for making software better right now. He has his company and web site here.

Jacob Nielsen (now of Nielsen and Norman Associates) has written several good books, my favorite is his recently revised book Multimedia and Hypertext. It explores many different aspects of hypertext and talks about several systems that the web could profitably learn from. His other book Usability Engineering is a general book on user interface design concepts and testing methods. Nielsen's web site is super (and I talk about it on the next page).

Edward Tufte is famous for his fascinating (and expensive) books on visual design. Tufte's work is at some distance from software user interface issues, but still worth thinking about seriously. His most useful book, from my perspective, was Envisioning Information.

Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass published a fascinating book on the topic of how humans relate socially to computers called The Media Equation. I was initially skeptical of the idea but I finished their book a believer. They produce evidence which strongly suggests that people will treat computers (and hence the software running on the computer) in a social manner. Consequently, software should be designed with this social interaction in mind. A very interesting book, well worth consideration.

An old book, but still quite interesting is Bruce Tognazzini's Tog On Interface. Tog was one of the chief user interface experts at Apple during the early and middle years of the Macintosh. His book was derived from the monthly column he once wrote for Mac developers. As such it is heavily based on Mac issues. But, since the Mac design has in large part become the world standard (thanks to Microsoft), the issues he brings up are still important today.

An even older book is Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things. I have the Voyager CD-ROM version of this books (along with his second book). Although the CD-ROM is not the ideal medium for reading, he adds a lot of value to the book with his multi-media commentary on the text. With Voyager's financial troubles of late, I'm not sure if this CD-ROM is still available.

A very good guide to user testing is by Joseph Dumas & Janice Redish A Practical Guide to Usability Testing. This goes into the nuts and bolts of the testing process.

Go on to the next page about Links to User Interface Design Sites.