Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think has been the book I recommend for anyone interested in understanding usability. His second effort, Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems, expands the idea of one of the chapters in Don’t Make Me Think. Staying true to the book’s subtitle of The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems, the book is a DIY guide to identify usability issues; though the fixing part is glossed over in the book. Steve Krug guides us through a process of conducting a small usability test and provides guidelines to run one such test in the book.

Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug

The key ‘maxims’ according to Steve Krug are:

• A morning a month, that’s all we ask. [Conduct a simple three-person usability test frequently.]
• Start earlier than you think makes sense. [Begin your testing as early as possible in your product development.]
• Recruit loosely and grade on a curve. [Try to get people who match your end-user profiles closely. Improvise if required.]
• Make it a spectator sport. [Involve everyone associated with the project and get them involved.]
• Focus ruthlessly on a small number of the most important problems. [Fix the important issue first.]
• When fixing problems, always do the least you can do. [The smallest changes are the most easiest change to make.]

At the end of the book, you get an idea on how to conduct a small usability test. The book tries to limit itself to a DIY approach and hence skips a large-scale usability testing process. But once one gets experience conducting usability tests on a smaller scale, it is just a matter of scaling it up to encompass a large usability test scenario.

If you have read Don’t Make Me Think and Designing the Obvious and you are still interested in getting your hands dirty with usability, then this book is definitely a must-read and a must-have in your bookshelf and I would rate it as 4/5.

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Targeted at people who have heard the word usability but not sure how to proceed further, Robert Hoekman, Jr. in his book, Designing the Obvious, does a good job of explaining usability and how to use user-centered design concepts in web projects. Staying true to the book’s subtitle of A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, the book explains the various concepts and theories relating to web usability.

“An obvious design would let me get in, get what I need, and get out without spending any time at all thinking about how the software works or work with my data.”

Though some concepts are just common sense approaches, it becomes easier for web application designers to understand why they need to do things a certain way. As the book is well-written with ample examples and screenshots, this book contains many tips and techniques to improve current interfaces.

Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman Jr

Chapters and what they talk about

• Defining the Obvious

  Obvious design is the result of a process that reveals the goals of your users, the contexts in which they use your sites and software, and the tasks they really want to achieve.

• Understand Users, Then Ignore Them

  People often don’t do what they think they do. They don’t act the way they think they would act. It is important to do user research before starting.

• Build Only What Is Absolutely Necessary

  Simplicity is better. Avoid feature creep and nice-to-have features.

• Support the User’s Mental Model

  A user’s mental model determines their appreciation or frustration with a product. Designing for mental models, rather than implementation models, is the rule to follow.

• Turn Beginners Into Intermediates, Immediately

  Don’t design for experts or beginners. Design for perpetual intermediates.

• Handle Errors Wisely

The best way to handle errors is to prevent them from ever occurring. Error messages that do not provide useful information do not help users. They hurt users.

• Design for Uniformity, Consistency, and Meaning

  Design patterns are a powerful tool when trying to maintain consistent user experiences across multiple interactions within a single application and across multiple applications.

• Reduce and Refine

  Clutter diminishes a user’s ability to form a workable mental model by crowding the important pieces of a screen in with unimportant ones. Clutter makes it more difficult for new users to become intermediate users by putting things in the way of the learning process. Clutter makes it hard to see the design in the design.

• Don’t Innovate When You Can Elevate

  Elevating the user experience is not about adding features to make an application stand out from the crowd. It’s about taking things away until the heart of the application is allowed to shine through.

If anything that was lacking in this book, it was a chapter on accessibility, which most web developers find themselves horrible at. Personally, I felt this book, along with Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, must be made compulsory reading and I would rate it as 4/5.

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