Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Even if you're not doing usability testing...
Comment: For any developer or designer who cares about user experience (and doing a better job), this is your book! No techie stuff. Just clear, to-the-point, and well-illustrated examples of what a user really does and the end-results you want to attain to make their experience a pleasant one.
It breaks my heart to give this book anything less than five stars, but the binding is horrible! I have about a dozen segments of the book that all broke away from the hard and inflexible binding as I read the book. Use extreme care - the publishers did not design this binding to lay flat in any way!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Don't think, just buy it!
Comment: Excellent book.
Being an internet user, i'm used to the tipical usability flaws on web applications. Being a developer, i'm used to write programs that work and also, to blame users that "don't get it". Well, after reading this book, turns out i'm now a smarter user and a better developer.
Quoting the book: "Like a lot of common sense, it's not necessarily obvious until after someone's pointed it out to you". As a developer, i needed it. I've read it in 2 days (large fonts are used).
The bookbinding however is not very good (pages are not very well attached).
Customer Rating:
Summary: Terrible binding
Comment: This is an expensive book (list price) for something less than 200 pages. Nonetheless the advice within it is worth every penny. I won't repeat what other reviewers have to say about the content. But please note that my copy fell apart before I'd finished the first read. The binding is awful. The pages fell out in ever increasing chunks until all I now have left is the cover and a bunch of sections that I have to keep stuffing back when I put the book away. And, it's a book that I refer to frequently.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Right to the point
Comment: This book has a no nonsense approach to web usability. Krug puts into words what we take for granted when both using AND designing web pages.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Valuable even if you are not a web designer
Comment: This book are useful to anyone planning any sort of process which other people will use -- not just web pages.
I bought this book because I was working on a related problem for a consulting firm -- how to integrate research and documentation of said research. The insights from this book into how people use a computer-based system allowed me to identify what was wrong with all of the proposed solutions -- such as software designed to handle references, like EndNote. The proposed solutions were too complex, requiring too much new learning and too many steps.
In the end we saved thousands of dollars by developing a very simple set of rules for putting together an excel spreadsheet for gathering and sourcing qualitative information -- easy to open, easy to operate, everyone already knows how to use the software.
The book was most useful because I was able to wave it in the air and announce "people won't use that feature" as we discussed different options. It was an antidote to the common tendency to feel that our co-workers "aught" or "should" do their work in a particular fashion. E.g. "Since documentation is important, people should be willing to spend some time doing it."
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