Designing Highly Useable Software
by Sybex
Finally A Usability Book For Programmers
Would you like to design your applications so they work the way theyre
supposed to? Designing Highly Useable Software teaches you how to
think about and plan for the needs of your users/administrators before
writing your first line of code, making your applications more sensible to
users. Stressing the need to consider how humans think and work, this
single volume addresses your broad design needs, including interface
design, modeling the real world, designing windows and dialog boxes,
software navigation, creating readable reports and software libraries, and
testing from the users perspective. Each chapter includes a real-world
scenario to bring home the content.
Personal Review: Designing Highly Useable Software by Sybex
If you're looking for a book on general software design, this book won't
help you much. This book is about creating usable software, not software
in general. It's very hard to pinpoint what makes something usable, but

Jeff does an outstanding job. I liked the fact that he often augmented a
technical lesson using stories that make learning the details fun. The
manner of presentation is interesting because Jeff doesn't rely on just one
technique to present the information. The details are often illustrated using
several methods, so it's easier to understand precisely what Jeff means.
Unlike many theory type books, this one has source code examples--
something that every developer can relate to.
The chapters that I liked best appear at the end of the book. They discuss
topics that many developers really don't know about, but should. For
example, Jeff takes time to point out a need for online help and tells you
why training is important. Of course, someone could make an argument
that developers do very little training, but if they don't understand what
makes software easy to teach to users, the software will never become
usable.
No, this won't be the only software design book on your shelf, but you owe
it to yourself to make this book part of your collection. This is the book that
every developer should read after reading a general software design book.
The world could certainly use more usable software and Jeff shows you
how.
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