Rocket Surgery Made Easy
It's been known for years that usability testing can dramatically improve products. But with a typical price tag of $5,000 to $10,000 for a usability consultant to conduct each round of tests, it rarely happens. In this how-to companion to Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Steve Krug spells out a streamlined approach to usability testing that anyone can easily apply to their own Web site, application, or other product. (As he said in Don't Make Me Think, "It's not rocket surgery".) Using practical advice, plenty of illustrations, and his trademark humor, Steve explains how to: Test any design, from a sketch on a napkin to a fully-functioning Web site or application Keep your focus on finding the most important problems (because no one has the time or resources to fix them all) Fix the problems that you find, using his "The least you can do" approach By paring the process of testing and fixing products down to its essentials ("A morning a month, that's all we ask"), Rocket Surgery makes it realistic for teams to test early and often, catching problems while it's still easy to fix them. Rocket Surgery Made Easy adds demonstration videos to the proven mix of clear writing, before-and-after examples, witty illustrations, and practical advice that made Don't Make Me Think so popular.
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What Hacker News says
- Steve Krug's other book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, got me into usability tests with real users, and how to get it in place in a corporate environment. It's shocking to watch real users use software.
- I suspect that phrase may be a oblique reference to the absolutely lovely UI testing book "Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems" by Steve Krug.
- My favourite books on design, both fundamental and UI/UX specifically:
- Universal Principles of Design
- The Design of Everyday Things
- Don't Make me Think
- Rocket Surgery Made Easy
- Defensive Design for the Web
- Forms that Work
- To learn usability testing you'll probably want to jump straight to "Rocket Surgery Made Easy", by the same author of "Don't make me think"
Steve Krug is a former colleague and brilliant guy, but at this stage learning how to test and hear from your users in practice is time 10x better spent than just learning the theory.
- Some other recommendations:
Don’t Make me Think and Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug
https://builtformars.com/ UX case studies
https://www.nngroup.com/ UX analyses and articles
Coursera has some UX courses you can audit for free
- I think it really depends on what you want to do.
1) Want to make user interfaces that are actually useful to people? Read up on product management, UX and interaction design. Important skills: articulating the problem you are solving and for what kind of user, and being able to validate whether your hypothesis is on point. Iterating before committing further resources to building a prototype. Conducting user testing sessions (rocket surgery made easy is a good resource for this).
2) Want to make a specific view / flow of a product inviting and visually appealing? Study visual design and typography.
3) Want to be able to build a functional prototype that looks reasonably good? Study frontend design / development. There are a lot of frameworks that could get you up and running.
IMHO going for (1) and (3) first is smart; if you can't prototype and evaluate a user experience that has a shot in hell of being useful to an actual user, being able to make stuff look pretty is kind of irrelevant (unless you are specializing and collaborating with engineers and UX people). In any of the above cases, at least knowing more precisely what you want to learn will help you do better googling, e.g "best books on visual design" or "best books on interaction design".
