9 Great User Interface Design Books
I was recently asked for a list of good books about user interface design, and after spending some time putting it together, I thought I'd share it here:
User Interface Principles
About Face, 3rd ed. by Alan Cooper
Basic principles. User Interface 101.
Sketching User Interfaces by Bill Buxton
Focuses on ideation, discovery, and prototyping. How to work quickly and intelligently, using "just enough technology" to arrive at and demonstrate candidate solutions to design problems.
The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin
The first half is an excellent overview of cognitive-based UI principles, more scientifically oriented than About Face. The second half, which builds on the first, details an integrated approach to fixing practically all the usability problems with software today. After the second reading I "got it," and it blew my mind.
Web Design Patterns & Best Practices
The Design of Sites, 2nd ed. by Douglas K. Van Duyne, James A. Landay, and Jason I. Hong
Catalog of common design patterns. Don't reinvent the wheel if you don't need to.
Designing Web Interfaces by Bill Scott and Theresa Neil
Discusses more up-to-date (as of 2009) interaction patterns. Focuses on applying good practices to interactive, dynamic components such as ajax page updates, inlays, drag & drop, transitions, autocomplete.
Client-side Implementation for Web Interfaces
Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman
Good explanation of the proper way to mark up content and style it, in a scalable, readable, maintainable way.
CSS Mastery by Andy Budd
Though subtitled "Advanced Web Standards Solutions", I found it in part an excellent walkthrough of basic CSS principles that helped shore up some deficiencies in my understanding. Similar to Bulletproof Web Design below, but they complement each other well if CSS is a major part of your work.
Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cedarholm
How to build many common web site/web app components them with CSS in a way that works across all browsers.
Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference, 3rd edition by Danny Goodman
Excellent (and heavy: 1300 pages!) reference work for HTML, CSS, DOM, Javascript. Exhaustive list of properties and methods per element/object. Includes browser compatibility information.