
Why Read It: Another short, fun and practical read. Find a topic that has usability and user issues, write a book summarizing best practices and the research surrounding them, and then ship it off. I would encourage all but a few staple UX tomes to be just like this book. Having that kind of reference is going to help considerably in the future. But, I know that this is one of those books I’ll probably be returning to frequently. When reading the book, this didn’t help a lot. The end of each chapter had take-away points. The shortness also helped with keeping the argument of the book to a point.Ĥ. But, if I had to or wanted to, I could have gotten through it much faster. I took my time with it, reading a chapter or three a day. Even though it is about 200 pages, with all of the pictures and how the type was set you could get through the whole thing in a handful of hours.

This helped make the arguments direct and understandable.ģ. Rather than make the book cover every possible application ever that has used a form, it kept to web forms and talked about specific examples with lots of pictures. The question of whether or not to put labels above, left, or right of the field was responded to with actual data.Ģ. It shows results of eye-tracking data and qualitative metrics of how users engaged with different forms. It had actual research to support the claims that were being made. That isn’t the to say that there isn’t value in reading them, but I can get more than bored.ġ.


The authors just find different ways of saying the same thing but within the context of their knowledge. The problem I have with a lot of UX books is that they just reiterate the same principles over and over again: put your user first, get feedback, design before implement, etc. mostly because I’m curious how other people see my profession and also because I don’t believe that I can stop learning. I read a good handful of UX and design books.
