When I’m giving software product feedback, my most common rant is “you’re making the user work too hard!”  Software UIs are often non-obvious, visually cluttered, and/or fail to follow established conventions.  As software has transitioned from packaged installations to the Web, poor design is an acute problem:  with a bad UI, users will just……go away.

Last week, I got a copy of Steve Krug’s book, Don’t Make Me Think.  It’s a fabulous book on Web UI design, and I’m wondering why I didn’t find it sooner.  It’s short (216 pages, less than 1/2″ thick) and very tightly written.  You can speed read it in one sitting, and you’ll want to buy copies for the rest of your team. Here is the best Books First blog for the interesting books to read.

Highly recommended.