Free Ebooks about Usability

If you are a reading buff as much as I am, you probably realized that good books don’t come cheap. Aside from that, they do tend to take a lot of space as well. That is why I have gathered some interesting free ebooks, which will perfectly fit on your tablet. Topic is Usability. Enjoy the reading and let us know if you ran in some free ebooks lately!

Handbook of Usability Testing, 2nd Edition

Whether it’s software, a cell phone, or a refrigerator, your customer wants no, expects your product to be easy to use. This fully revised handbook provides clear, step-by-step guidelines to help you test your product for usability. Completely updated with current industry best practices, it can give you that all-important marketplace advantage: products that perform the way users expect. You ll learn to recognize factors that limit usability, decide where testing should occur, set up a test plan to assess goals for your product’s usability, and more.

EDIT: After contacting O’Reilly Media, publisher of this book, I removed the link because the website illegally hosted O’Reilly’s books.

Designed for Use

Weaving together hands-on techniques and fundamental concepts, you’ll learn how to make usability the cornerstone of your design process. Each technique chapter explains a specific approach you can use during the design process to make your product more user friendly, such as storyboarding, usability tests, and paper prototyping. Idea chapters are concept-based: how to write usable text, how realistic your designs should look, when to use animations.

EDIT: After contacting O’Reilly Media, publisher of this book, I removed the link because the website illegally hosted O’Reilly’s books. You could also buy the paper version.

Converting the believers

Online marketing is about creating believers. In the U.S. alone, companies spent over $21 Billion last year driving visitors to their websites and doing their best to turn doubters into believers. For all of the money spent leading believers to the virtual door, though, only a fraction of those companies spent the time and money necessary to convert those believers into buyers.
Converting the believers

Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines

Developed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), ‘Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines’ provides the latest Web design guidance from the research and other forms of evidence. This unique publication has been updated from its earlier version to include over 40 new or updated research guidelines, bringing the total to 209.
Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines

User-Centered Design

How do you design engaging applications that people love to use? This book demonstrates several ways to include valuable input from potential clients and customers throughout the process. With practical guidelines and insights from his own experience, author Travis Lowdermilk shows you how usability and user-centered design will dramatically change the way people interact with your application.

EDIT: After contacting O’Reilly Media, publisher of this book, I removed the link because the website illegally hosted O’Reilly’s books.

I’ve also collected some free ebooks about interface design in a previous post. If ebooks are not your thing at all, you could have a look at my UX book collection.