USABILITY BOOKSHELF
Here are some of the books that have helped to shape my thinking about usability and user-centered design. These authors present new approaches to persistent problems, combining vision, pragmatism, and a respect for the details of everyday life. For more essays and insights on usability and user experience matters, vist the new Weblog UXculture.Com.
Donald Norman: The Design Of Everyday Things
Norman is a cognitive psychologist and usability consultant who pioneered the field of user-centered design. This book offers an engaging synthesis of ideas on how to design usable systems and tools, and why so many designs confound most users. At the heart of the book is Norman's argument that a system reflects the mental model (i.e., the thinking) of the people who design it. Users of the system can't talk to the designers: they have only clues to go on. If there's a gap between the designer's model and the user's model, and the clues aren't clear, then the system isn't usable. The solution? Talk to users to close gaps between the designer model and the user model, and provide ample and effective clues to overcome any gaps that remain.
Alan Kay: The PC As A Personal Dynamic Medium
Alan Kay is a scientist and artist polymath who pioneered many computing advances, including object-oriented programming, the graphic user interface, and the notebook PC, helping to evolve the computer from a cold calculation machine into a personal dynamic medium through which users can learn, contribute, and collaborate. One of Kay's essays, User Interface: A Personal View, can be found in the excellent anthology, "The Art of Human Computer Interface Design," edited by Brenda Laurel, published in 1990 and still timely. In it, Kay recalls his early realization that interactive computing could help change, and in fact improve, how we think: "If the personal computer is a truly new medium, then the very use of it would actually transform the thought patterns of an entire civilization... What kind of thinker would you become if you grew up with an active simulator connected, not just to one point of view, but to all the points of view of the ages, represented so they could be dynamically tried out and compared?"
Terry Winograd: Bringing Design To Software
Terry Winograd is an HCI and interaction design pioneer who recently founded the Standford d.School program, along with IDEO founder David Kelley. Winograd also served as an advisor to Larry Page for the thesis that lead to Google. This book, which includes essays and interviews with thought leaders like Kelley, Donald Norman, and the late Donald Schon, shows how and why design and software fit togther to create a user experience that's "both appropriate and effective for the people who us it." Winograd writes: Software is not just a device with which the user interacts; it is also the generator of a space in which the user lives. Software design is like architecture: When an architect designs a home or an office building, a structure is being specified. More significantly, though, the patterns of life for its inhabitants are being shaped."
Kevin Lynch: What Time Is This Place?
Lynch was an urban planner and philosopher who studied the way people navigate cities and form mental maps of their path. One insight from the many Lynch offers: a break in the visual or architectural pattern of the city is a key aid to memory and learning. This observation poses interesting challenges for Internet development. The efficiencies to be gained from standardization and templated design have to be balanced with the need for differentiation and landmarks to help users remember where they are and how they got there.
Jane Jacobs: The Death And Life Of Great American Cities
Written in 1961 but still relevant today, Jacob's book captures the microeconomics of urban life and explains why density and diversity of people and interactions -- also known as "rubbing shoulders" -- are essential elements to local economies. She also maps out a compelling bottom-up methodology: "The processes that occur in cities are not arcane, capable of only being understood by experts. They can be understood by almost anybody. Many ordinary people already understand them; they simply have not given these processes names, or considered that by understanding these ordinary arrangements of cause and effect, we can also direct them if we want to." The same might be said about the study of usability.
Richard Saul Wurman: Information Anxiety
Wurman coined the term "information architecture" well before the days of the World Wide Web, and this book from 1989 continues to bring clarity to the challenge of how to organize information in order to turn it into knowledge. Among the many bitesize bits of wisdom he offers: "While information may be infinite, the ways of structuring it are not. And once you have a place in which the information can be plugged, it becomes that much more useful."