A blizzard of books (2)

I hadn’t checked the Peachpit Press web site for months, but I’ve found more titles to tempt me. So, not just the new titles by Robin Williams, but new books too by Steve Krug and by Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice of the Nielsen Norman Group.

Steve’s book, a “do-it-yourself guide to finding and fixing usability problems”, is called Rocket Surgery Made Easy. To give you an idea of Steve’s approach, Chapter 1 is called “You don’t see any elephants around here, do you?” and Chapter 2 “I will now saw my [lovely] assistant in half”. Steve doesn’t teach you how to saw people in half, but he

spells out an approach to usability testing that anyone can easily apply to their own web site, application, or other product.

Kara and Jakob’s book is called Eyetracking Web Usability – the “does what it says on the can” approach to book titling. According to the blurb,

Their findings will help designers, software developers, writers, editors, product managers, and advertisers understand what people see or don’t see, when they look, and why.

I’ve attended – and greatly enjoyed – Kara’s usability workshops, and have read – and greatly enjoyed – Steve’s Don’t Make Me Think. So I reckon these new titles will be worth reading – a treat for 2010.

If you read either of these books in the meantime, I’d love to hear your views – let me know in the comments.

By Marian Dougan

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