Czegel, Barbara. Help Desk Practitioner's Handbook. John Wiley, 1999. A day-to-day reference for the help desk professional. Barbara Czegal's previous book, Running an Effective Help Desk, laid the groundwork for setting up and managing a help desk. This companion book will be the bible for the person actually fielding calls and responding to the wide variety of problems that can emerge. Drawing on real world examples, this reference will help both new and seasoned help desk pros perform their jobs faster and more efficiently. It includes coverage of the range of topics likely to cross a help desk, including applications, network management, the Web and intranets.

Lynch, Patrick, and Sarah Horton. Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites (Second Edition). Yale University Press, 1999 (http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual). The essence of the Yale University Center for Advanced Instructional Media's online site design guide. Sections on typography and editorial style set this manual apart from many Web style guides, with attention to the fine details that separate good sites from great.

Mullet, Kevin and Darrell Sano. Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques. SunSoft Press, 1995. An excellent introduction to the design theories involved in the creation of visual user interfaces. Instead of the usual examples and pictures of computer screens and application menus, Mullet approaches the concept of UI from its "outside world" roots. With examples ranging from street signs to corporate logos to the map of the London Underground, each section attacks the issues of interface design from the ground up, appealing first to the eye and then to the mind. Task menus are compared with concert programs and street signs are equated with icons.

Not a technical book, so advanced developers might want to supplement it with a platform-specific how-to. For aesthetic advice and sheer enjoyment, anyone involved with or interested in interface design should check it out.

Nielsen, Jakob. Usability Engineering. Academic Press, 1993. "Usability" is the measurement of how easy or difficult it is to be productive with a piece of software. "Usability engineering" is the formal study of usability. Nielson defines usability and ways to measure and improve it. Includes guides for planning new software, working with end users, and running tests with users.

Nielsen, Jakob. Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. New Riders Publishing, 2000. This guide segments discussions of Web usability into page, content, site, and intranet design. This breakdown skillfully isolates for the reader many subtly different challenges that are often mixed together in other discussions.

One of the unique aspects of this book is the use of actual statistics to buttress the author's opinions on various techniques and technologies. He includes survey results on sizes of screens, types of queries submitted to search portals, response times by connection type and more.

Topics covered: Cross-platform design, response time considerations, writing for the Web, multimedia implementation, navigation strategies, search boxes, corporate intranet design, accessibility for disabled users, international considerations, and future predictions.

Pearrow, Mark. Web Site Usability Handbook. Charles River Media, 2000. If you evaluate and improve the usability of Web sites as a major part of your work, this is the book for you. It does not, as the title might imply, specifically show Web developers how to make their sites more usable. But it does explore the growing field of Web usability, with equal emphasis on theory and practicality, and focuses primarily on measuring usability accurately and applying it to formal and informal testing. Presents the framework for a usability lab complete with video observation, and shows how to conduct objective usability testing.

Topics covered: User-centered design, usability tools, human-factors psychology, sensation and perception, design guidelines, heuristic evaluation, usability lab setup, usability testing, web accessibility, and usability statistic analysis.

Spool, Jared, Tara Scanlon, Will Schroeder, Carolyn Snyder, and Terri DeAngelo. Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide. Morgan Kaufman, 1998. Undoubtedly the most comprehensive, yet accessible, report to date on how Web sites actually work when users need specific answers. A must for every Web page designer! Researched and compiled by User Interface Engineering, the results are written in an easy to understand style, illustrating the need to make Web sites useful, not complicated. Features: Based on an extensive study of actual users -- not theory, not graphic design principles, and not new tricks to make a "cool" Web sites. Demonstrates how people actually navigate and extract information on Web sites. Offers guidance for evaluating and improving the usability of Web sites. Findings are updated at http://www.uie.com/

Sun Technical Publications. Read Me First! A Style Guide for the Computer Industry. Sun Microsystems, 1996. Everything you need to know about documenting programming projects. Covers it all from basic punctuation and style pointers to legal guidelines, from writing for an international audience to creating a documentation department. The CD includes FrameMaker templates for easy book creation complete with paragraph and character tags.