The number of books and websites related to website usability (and, to a lesser degree, website effectiveness) is essentially unlimited. The following is a highly arbitrary selection of resources. If you’d like to suggest others to add to the list, please send them to resources@the-effective-website.com.
Books
- Boag, Paul. Website Owner’s Manual: The Secret to a
Successful Website. - Maybe not the secret, but plenty of worthwhile ideas, as well as an excellent guide to useful websites.
- Cooper, Alan. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore
the Sanity. - Why programmers aren’t to be trusted to design usable software products (or websites), by the father of Visual Basic and the founder of the company Cooper Interaction Design (now known simply as Cooper).
- Cooper, Alan, Robert Reimann, and David Cronin. About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design.
- Not exclusively about websites, but essential for understanding goal-directed design, personas, and a myriad of other
relevant topics. - Dver, Alyssa S. Software Product Management Essentials.
- A website is, for all intents and purposes, a software product, and (nearly) everything in this book is as applicable to websites as it is to software products.
- Goodwin, Kim. Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services.
- Again, not exclusively about websites (or even software products), but an extremely thorough and comprehensive guide to the Cooper methodology by the VP Design and General Manager of
the company. - Krug, Steve. Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.
- Somewhat dated by now (it was published in 2000) and heavily biased toward e-commerce sites, but still the classic work in the field and entertaining as well.
- Nielsen, Jakob and Hoa Loranger. Prioritizing Web Usability.
- A relatively recent (2006) book co-authored by perhaps the world’s foremost authority on website usability. Again, shows a strong bias toward e-commerce sites, but still required reading.
- Norman, Donald A. The Design of Everyday Things.
- The classic work on usability by Jakob Nielsen’s business partner and a leading expert on usability in the real world.
Websites
- www.usability.gov
- The home page of the Federal Government for website usability. Points to a huge number of other resources.
- www.w3.org
- The website of the World Wide Web Consortium. Includes a number of useful tools for checking and validating websites.
- www.useit.com
- Jakob Nielsen’s website. One of the most (certainly intentionally) unattractive websites in the world, but full of great content.
- www.webpagesthatsuck.com
- Vincent Flanders’ extremely funny and informative website. “Learn good web design by looking at bad web design.” Also, a good resource for books.
- www.designshack.co.uk/articles/developer-tools-in-safari
- How to use Safari to simulate how a website will look on the iPhone.
- www.ipadpeek.com
- A website that shows you how a website will look on the iPad.
- answers.oreilly.com/topic/523-using-advanced-search-techniques
- Useful search techniques not only for Google but also for Yahoo and Bing.