Don't Make Me Think

Hiya, I'd consider these books/articles/podcasts: * Secrets of Consulting by Gerald Weinberg: http://geraldmweinberg.com/Site/Consulting_Secrets.html Every problem is a people problem. * Refactoring by Martin Fowler et. al: https://martinfowler.com/books/refactoring.html talks about how and why to refactor, as well as providing a nomenclature for the process. * Code Complete by Steve McConnell. https://stevemcconnell.com/books/ A bit dated (the last version I could find was from 2004) but a great overview of the entire software process, from requirements to maintenance. * The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brookes: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/mythical-man-month-the/... (https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/mythical-man-month-the/0201835959/) best practices about software development, written about a project from the 1960 and 1970s. * The Joel On Software Strategy Letters: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-... (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-ben-and-jerrys-vs-amazon/) is the first one. All of them (I think there are five) are great.…

+1 for the Norman book. A bit verbose, but in the end worth it. Krug's "Don't Make Me Think", while more UI / UX is a solid compliment to "Everyday Things."

In a similar vein, Don't Make Me Think about simple website usability is a good place to start. I also like The Best Interface Is No Interface, although the original article was sufficient.

Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug. I used it for years as a required text in pretty much every UX related class I taught. Entertaining, super digestable and very nutritious.

I can attest to those two books being fantastic resources on UI/UX design. They're the only two books I've read on the matter and I'm consistently praised as one of the more user experience focused engineers in any team I work on. Although, I can't walk through half the doors in the world it seems without going "why the hell does this pull door have a push handle!!", so there is that side effect.

In reality design for the web and phone applications ends up being largely about typography. So a good foundations book on typography like "Designing with Type" or any other of the usual suspects is a good start. That said, some applications have very little text so this is not always true anymore in UI/UX. "Don't Make Me Think" is a good read, but the direct info is not really as important as the point it is trying to make. Aggressively reducing friction and decisions for the user at all points. If reading that book helps get that point across then it's worth the read. On how to do that... If you are new to design, just pickup a used intro textbook on design. Something like "Design Basics" by Lauer and Pentak. Or really any intro book on design. They all cover the same basic concepts you'll need for UI/UX design. Fundamental stuff like visual hierarchy and composition. Honestly, just go find a used one for $8 and read through it. Most of them are pretty quick reads.…

I personally question anyone 1-2 degrees away from software that hasn't read "Don't make me think." Its a short and easy 2 hour read but the level of paradigm change you receive if you're being exposed to hci for the first time is immense. I even found its thinking useful from the developer side of things, as in, writing software libraries that were obvious and easy to use.

Don’t Make Me Think http://sensible.com/dmmt.html

Design of Everyday Things & Don't Make Me Think are both likely to be in your employer's library, or on a co-worker's shelf. Not quite free, but I bet you can find a hard-copy to borrow.

(For background, I'm a faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute) For best books, it depends on if you want to understand users or do implementation. But generally, I'd highly recommend Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things to improve how you look at the world, and Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think for simple and practical design tips. For tools, the best is paper prototyping, where you have your team just draw it out on paper and simulate the UI. It's simple, fast, and cheap, and from a cognitive perspective, you can explore more of the design space (think breadth-first search instead of depth-first), and you don't get overly attached to your designs. In my course on UX design, we also use Balsamiq and InVision, though other tools seem fine (e.g. Marvel, Figma, etc). One of our alums created this great chart comparing different prototyping tools: https://www.cooper.com/prototyping-tools For schools, some to check out would be Georgia Tech, University of Washington's Master's of HCI, Indiana University, University of Michigan iSchool, and (of course) Carnegie Mellon's Master's of HCI.…

Don't Make Me Think is a good one, but I always felt like its lessons could have been summed up in an infographic...though I guess that would be missing the context to get people over that hill. I guess if you don't know that intuitively, you're the kind of person that needs that book.

Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug and The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. While they're not strictly software or programming related, I really like the concepts of making interfaces that require minimal thought to use and empathizing with your users. I've seen an unfortunate amount of "programming machismo" where a confusing or poorly engineered system is used and accepted because "that's just how things work in the real world". And whenever someone struggles with the process, it's obviously because they're wrong, not the system. But more often than not, if more than one person has trouble understanding your system, whether it's an API, a website, a build process, the design is the issue.

Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. The chapter about “religious debates” in particular was hilariously accurate, about how teams of people will argue about strongly held personal beliefs about things that can’t be proven.

"Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug, Second Edition The book changed the course of my life. It allowed me to build a sustainable business, that at some point became my full-time job. The magic of that book comes from the fact that it allows you to gradually develop a compassion. For your customers, prospects and all other living beings in this world. Having that compassion embedded, you start to see a lot of subtle things. The most impactful experience for me was to comprehend that the world is a place full of pain and hardships. Not only for me, but for all others too. Once you see it, you immediately understand there is plenty of space where you can bring the value to others. But that's not all. The story does not end there. It turns out that bringing the value to others brings value to you.…

oddly enough...The Phoenix Project and Don't Make Me Think

I still really like and would strongly recommend Steve Krug's "Don't make me think" (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0321344758)

Joel Spolsky's "User Interface Design for Programmers" is concise, educational, entertaining... and free (even an easy-to-read all-in-one HTML page): http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/fog0000000249.html Also highly recommend Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think" (as others have already commented): http://www.sensible.com/dmmt.html

Don't make me think is awesome and I believe you can get a free PDF version of it online. (Possibly an older edition, but it is just a great book.)

Don't Make Me Think - Steve Krug Information Dashboard Design - Stephen Few

I would look at a few design and user experience books... "Don't make me think", "Thinking fast and slow" and "Designed for use" come to mind. As developers, and even PMs we will tend to overload our users with too much... simplification, structure, clarity come to mind. Another deep issue, and I don't have any books to recommend center around nomenclature... Too many projects don't take the time to concentrate on naming things from a high level... From project features to user roles and the language/platform that integrate them, there's often confusion and blurred lines with the same names used in different contexts.

Software development related reads with a strong focus on proven practices that enhance software quality in terms of readability and maintainability (and other software ~ilities) to ease the process of changing the software later on. The Art of Readable Code by Dustin Boswell & Trevor Foucher Don't Make Me Think 2ed by Steve Krug Remote: Office not Required by Jason Fried & DHH The Art of Unit Testing by Roy Osherove Code Complete 2 by Steve McConnell Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler The Practice of Programming by Brian Kernighan & Rob Pike JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford Code Simplicity by Max Kanat-Alexander An Introduction to Programming in Go by Caleb Doxsey at http://www.golang-book.com/ Also read: How To Be Black by Baratunde Thurston

Don't make me think was the best book I made someone else read in 2011. It changed my boss's view of our web site, and now he's on my 'side'.

Here's a few I've really liked that have a broader subject matter than only what you asked for. I figure that if you like to read you'd like these books. --- NON-FICTION --- Darkness Visible A Mathemematician's Apology Omnivore's Dilemma Fermat's Enigma The Code Book Born to Run Judgement of Paris Siddhartha Killing Pablo The Victorian Internet Lone Survivor I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman Papillon Into Thin Air Born on a Blue Day Touching the Void Got Fight The Conquest of Happiness --- FICTION --- Switch Bitch Lost Horizon The Cuckoo's Egg The Simlarillion The Time Traveler's Wife The Alchemist The Count of Monte Cristo A Canticle for Leibowitz Neverwhere My Uncle Oswald Stories of Your Life and Others Invisible Cities Life of Pi Atlas Shrugged --- WALL STREET / FINANCE --- When Genius Failed Liar's Poker Buffett (Lowenstein) Bull! Black-Scholes and Beyond (textbook) Fixed Income Securities (textbook) The Road to Serfdom The Smartest Guys in the Room Fortune's Formula The Fourth Turning Inside the House of Money --- ENTREPRENEURSHIP / COMPUTERS (non-textbook) --- Masters of Doom It's Not About the Bike Dot. Bomb Founders at Work The PayPal Wars…

Influence - The Psychology of Persuasion by Cialdini. http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Busine... (http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Business-Essentials/dp/006124189X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216856193&sr=8-1) The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing - Violate Them at Your Own Risk! http://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Marketing-Violate/dp... (http://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Marketing-Violate/dp/0887306667/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216858700&sr=1-1) Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to We Usability, by Steve Krug: http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/032134... (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/0321344758/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216860599&sr=1-1) Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large Scale Web Sites, by Paul Rosenfeld and Peter Morville: http://www.amazon.com/Information-Architecture-World-Wide-We... (http://www.amazon.com/Information-Architecture-World-Wide-Web/dp/0596527349/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216860826&sr=1-1) Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, by Paco Underhill…

If you're short on time: http://joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000057.html Spolsky's work is light and easy to read. This work is geared towards "progammers", although that is not mutually exclusive with the word "CEO". It'll help you avoid more obvious mistakes. Nielson and About Face are more thorough. I haven't read Don't Make Me Think but I've heard good things (and lots of comments here, so obviously I should read that one...)

One really cool thing about "Don't make me think" is that it is short and highly readable. For some reason books of this genre often seem like Russian novels of the 19th century in thickness. Probably the most usable book about usability out there.

I second. I read "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" after I read "Don't Make me Think." These are 2 books I not only reread but recommend every person involved with development or design around web to read.

Not only is the book great, Steve Krug is an all around nice guy and fun to listen to. Just heard him speak yesterday at the Business of Software conference. If you ever get a chance to hear him in person, I'd take it.

Don't Make Me Think http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/032134... (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/0321344758/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220625482&sr=8-1)