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Recommended books on user experience, ethnography for design and related topics

Below you'll find my collection of recommended books by topic.

Introduction to the issues

The best introduction to usability problems in everyday life is Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things (also known as The Psychology of Everyday Things). It's pre-web but a highly relevant introduction to the nature of the problem.

In a similar vein, I'd recommend Kim Vicente's recent book, The Human Factor. Vicente ranges fairly widely over areas of life affected by bad design, and the - sometimes appalling - consequences of it. It's a book I'd recommend for people who need to understand both the the relationship between people and technology and what 'design' really means.

The Human Factor also provides light reading for practitioners, though the framework it uses for considering levels of design and risk within systems - based on Jen Rasmussen's risk management framework - is useful.

Ethnography

My favourite introductory text to the general practice of ethnography is Ethnography: Principles and Practice by Hammersley & Atkinson. James Spradley's two books, The Ethnographic Interview and Participant Observation, expand considerably on aspects of the two techniques central to the ethnographic approach.

For practical advice on planning and conducting fieldwork-based research across a range of social science disciplines, take a look at Howard Becker's Tricks of the Trade: How to think about your research while you're doing it. Becker gets to the heart of issues such as sampling and concepts. [By the way, his Writing for Social Scientists is also excellent.]

For bedtime reading, try The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut by Nigel Barley, which contains a surprising number of lessons for the first-world, urban ethnographer of technology, despite its rural, west African setting. It's also a really good read.

For more suggestions, see the Ethnography resources page on this site.

Workplace and organisation studies

Contextual Design by Beyer & Holtzblatt (1998) looks at methods for approaching the workplace and utilising the output, though in my opinion some of the suggested approaches are overly complex for the contraints of the typical corporate workplace.

Technology in Action by Heath & Luff addresses working areas such as general medical practice, news production, the control room of London Underground and architectural practice through video-based field studies.

Workplace Studies: Recovering Work Practice and Informing System Design by Luff, Hindmarsh & Health, includes contributions from a number of old hands in this area, including Lucy Suchman, Graham Button, John Hughes, Richard Harper and Mark Rouncefield.

Wixon & Ramey's Field Methods Casebook for Software Design is a collection of accounts from the field using ethnographic approaches by a range of authors.

Creating Breakthrough Ideas: The Collaboration of Anthropologists and Designers in the Product Development Industry (eds. Susan Squires and Bryan Byrne) is a useful collection of accounts from the commercial world.

For more suggestions, see the ethnography resources page on this site.

Networks

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a professor of physics, gives networks a more solid treatment than most in Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science and Everyday Life.

Communities

Anyone interested in virtual communities should try Jenny Preece's Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability.

The User and the Web

On user experience on the web, a good introduction is the recently arrived (2002) The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett, a book that gives a systematic overview and is brief and high-level enough to give to complete beginners - including managers, directors and those other strange beasts, graphic designers. This is not a book of practical usability approaches for novices, however, for which I'd recommend Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think (2002).

Interaction Design Textbooks

A useful recent (2002) textbook introduction to interaction is Interaction Design by Jenny Preece, Yvonne Rogers & Helen Sharp. (This is not a new edition of their classic Human-Computer Interaction, but a completely new book.)

In his textbook Designing the User Interface, Ben Shneiderman looks at virtually all aspects of the human-computer interface. It provides a good introduction to the issues, as well as supplying some useful resources, such as an extensive usability evalution questionnaire.

Also in this area is the new edition of Human Computer Interaction by Dix et al.

Dust or Magic: Secrets of Successful Multimedia Design by Bob Hughes is not a textbook but rather a good read for anyone in this field. Bob provides historical perspective, practical advice, and many accounts of real and very personal experiences from practitioners at the interaction design coal face. He is also perhaps the only author in this field to quote Ramones lyrics in his text.

Information Architecture

I'd recommend the second edition (2002) of Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville's Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, a much expanded and largely rewritten book that was already the standard work on this area in its first edition.

For complete novices, Christina Wodke's Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web is very accessible and some would say chatty, though it doesn't go into any particular topic in much detail.

Design Tools

Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces, by Carolyn Snyder (2003), provides comprehensive coverage of how to make and use lo-tech prototypes.

Displaying Information

Edward Tufte is critical of the way 'chartjunk generators' (aka graphics packages) are used, and has many ideas about how to improve the design of statistical graphics and other data. Tufte's books include The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations.

Writing for the Web

Hot Text: Web Writing That Works, by Jonathan and Lisa Price, covers all aspects of the written word on the Web, including creating meaningful link text and meaningful labels. It's a fairly chunky tome but not dense.

Accessibility

Books on accessibility have started to appear over the last two years. These include Building Accessible Websites by Joe Clark, Constructing Accessible Web Sites by Thatcher et al, and Web Accessibility for People With Disabilities by Michael G. Paciello.

Handheld Usability

For handheld devices, see Handheld Usability by Scott Weiss, a comprehensive take on all aspects of designing for the smaller device - he covers PDAs, the pocket PC and the mobile phone - and how to go about testing the results.

Also handy is a volume edited by Eric Bergman, Information Appliances and Beyond. This includes a significant amount of European material.

Usability Testing

If you need to carry out testing, there are two volumes: A Practical Guide to Usability Testing by Dumas & Redish and Handbook of Usability Testing by Jeffrey Rubin.

Selling Usability

If you need ROI ammunition to sell usability to others, try Cost Justifying Usability by Bias and Mayhew, although it's a little elderly now.

And finally...

At this point I have to admit to any old favourite: Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine by Don Norman. This book looks at problems of classification and agents (so pertinent for e-commerce sites and web architecture in general), internal versus external representations or how we use the external world to support our own memory, office organisation over the years and much more. It's a good read and may even lead you to reorganise your own working space.

[You may have noticed that I have both started and finished this page with Don Norman.]

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