Name: Usability Engineering
ISBN: 9780125184069

What Hacker News says

svilen_dobrevMar 2025

eh. For who want's to get deeper/broader view, there's a "bible" on UX.. called "Usability engineering" by Jakob Nielsen ~1993 [0].

IMO The first 2 (two) chapters are, like, mandatory - the what and the why. The rest, is mostly details - how. (but it has even how to organise random-street-user-tests and what to look for in those, etc)

Although, looking at recent 10 years of (software-or-car) UXs, i feel noone reads these anymore :/ Sadly.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Usability-Engineering-Interactive-Tech...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability_Engineering

thread

munificentApr 2018

It's been years since I've actively worked on my UI education, but the ones I liked were:

* The Design of Everyday Things

* The Inmates are Running the Asylum

* Any of Edward Tufte's books

* Usability Engineering

thread

yaroneMay 2025

Nielsen's "Usability Engineering" was my FIRST EVER Amazon.com purchase in June 1998.

thread

calmbonsaiJan 2025

The author is blatantly wrong wrt "jeans and hiking", but otherwise firstly doing the "discount" version of a thing to learn the thing is the right approach.

Specifically to product usability, as much as Jakob Nielsen is an iconoclast in certain circles, his Discount Usability Engineering principles are timeless: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/web-discount-usability/

thread

intrepidheroApr 2020

Relevant quote from my reading yesterday: "Time itself is on the side of increasing the perceived need for usability since the software market seems to be shifting away from the features war of earlier years. User interface design and customer service will probably generate more added value for computer companies than hardware manufacturing, and user interfaces are a major way to differentiate products in a market dominated by an otherwise homogenizing trend towards open systems." - Jakob Nielson, Usability Engineering - 1993.

I think he partly got the prediction right, that usability would be big differentiator. Apple and MS over the following years had big efforts focused on consistency in their interfaces and we had what many consider a golden age of UI usability, at least from a consistency standpoint. I think what happened next is that two things came along and basically reset the state of UI design back to zero: Mobile and the web.

Both platforms were so radically different that Apple and MS UI guidelines were useless. We got a horde of web and mobile designers experimenting with all sorts of novel interfaces. Experimentation is a great thing but consistency has definitely suffered. I've long thought there was big money to made by somebody wrapping up a complete linux distro, with a set of common applications (libreoffice, et al) but putting in the (very significant) effort to standardize _every_ interface, write good manuals and provide customer support. Sort of like the service that Red Hat provides for servers but with a desktop focus. Maybe they couldn't eat MS's lunch, but if they could demonstrate big productivity gains for businesses, maybe they could.

In the last decade I think we've seen the (much needed) injection of artistic talent into the UI design space. UIs today are much more beautiful than in 1995. That's because businesses realized that users value beauty and hardware improved to the point where more visual effects could be provided without sacrificing performance. In the next decade I think we'll see a resurgence of focus on accessibility and usability centered around design guidelines that coalesce out of consensus in disparate communities rather than corporate policy. I think especially that as Moore's law continues to flatten out, and network connection speeds start to platau we're going to see a renewed focus on responsive UI design and application performance. I am excited about these trends and feel optimistic about software design going forward.

Too bad Nielson was totally wrong about customer service though. :-(

thread