Usability books

This is one of a series of reading lists I put together between 2002 and 2004 when I was starting out in interaction and experience design, building out a personal canon from books I was buying, borrowing from libraries, or lending to students. The lists are grouped by topic. This one is on usability, the discipline that gave interaction design its empirical grounding.
Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things is the foundational book, and still the one to read first. Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think is the approachable practitioner’s companion. Beyer & Holtzblatt’s Contextual Design is the canonical research-methods book, the one that taught a generation of designers how to watch users in their actual contexts. Nielsen is the dominant figure of the era, for better and worse; both his books are worth knowing even where you disagree.
The Amazon links below are what I had at the time, most will be dead now, but the ISBNs will find you a copy.

The Design of Everyday Things

Donald Norman.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Things That Make Us Smart

Donald Norman.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

The Design of Sites: Patterns, Principles, and Processes for Crafting a Customer-Centered Web Experience

Douglas K. Van Duyne, James Landay, Jason I. Hong.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

User-Centred Web Design

John Cato.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Contextual Design: A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs

Hugh Beyer, Karen Holtzblatt.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

User and Task Analysis for Interface Design

Joann Hackos, Janice Redish.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Web Accessibility for People With Disabilities

Michael G. Paciello.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Design by People for People: Essays on Usability

Russell Branaghan.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Designing Web Usability

Jakob Nielsen.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Usability Engineering

Jakob Nielsen.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Web Site Usability

Jared M. Spool.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com

Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

Steve Krug.
amazon.co.uk / amazon.com