I found Don’t Make Me Think covered materials I was already aware of. Clearly it is a quick, concise book for those who aren’t already familiar with good design, or who are interested in it as stakeholders rather than designers. I’m sure it would’ve been more useful if I had read it at the beginning of learning about usability.
Access by Design, however, was so simplistic and repetitive as to be annoying. I didn’t finish it. The same points were repeated in several sections, and so basic I find it hard to imagine any web designer isn’t already aware of them.
Meanwhile last night I fell in love with Designing Web Navigation by James Kalbach, and Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Designing Web Navigation is subtitled Optimizing the User Experience, and it is richly coloured and beautifully designed in itself. It considers the analysis of the website itself as well as user behaviour to evaluate and determine how navigation methods can be used. Graphic design, information architecture, visual logic, user research and behaviour, and much more, are considered along with investigation of the mechanisms of navigation (ex. breadcrumbs, site maps, a-z directories, paging, and several others).
Flow was located in the Psychology section, and rather than focusing on design, it is a set of investigations on “optimal experience”. Flow is characterized by “deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement”, and is achieved when people are so engaged in what they are doing because they enjoy it that they lose a sense of time, feel more creative, and feel extremely comfortable. I am interested in flow because I see it as the goal of user experience design - although accessibility is admirable, and usability is important as well, I suggest it is flow that can really make a website or application shine. Therefore I’m very interested to examine the subject from a psychology standpoint so I can consider how to bring it forward in design.
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