Usability in general

Usability.net - European site, good links to tools and useful info.

UsabilityNet'sMethods Table -- A good matrix of methods classified by stage in project. Not exhaustive, but useful.

Society for Technical Communication Usability SIG site - excellent source of lots of practical info

Spin Group - good collection of articles on usability topics and methods

UsabilityFirst.com -- This website provides information and resources for key issues related to usability in website and software design. UsabilityFirst.com believes that helping people do their work in an effective and enjoyable way should be the top priority in design because if a product is not usable, people will not use it.

Usability Professionals' Association -- A forum to promote usability concepts and techniques worldwide.

Usable Web -- A comprehensive guide to resources about Web usability. Stopped updating at beginning of 2003 and many links older than that, so will get less useful over time.

Usability Testing and Research by Carol Barnum -- Links to web resources on usability tied to Barnum's book on usability.

Usability SIG (Society for Technical Communication) -- Lots of useful references.

The HCI Bibliograhy -- The most comprehensive source on human-computer interaction.

Usability.gov -- Really excellent site -- National Cancer Institute resource for designing usable web sites and user interfaces.

Columnists:

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox -- One-stop shopping for Nielsen's view of the world. Increasingly dedicated to advertising for their (expensive) reports, but still has useful info.

AskTog.com -- Bruce Tognazzini’s columns on design.

User Interface engineering - Jared Spool's organization. They hype their own trainings but have good short articles, too

WEB RESOURCES

The following are resources for Web Survey Tools:

Questionnaires in Usability Engineering -- A reasonably good site, however, the link they provide to their own web usability survey is currently broken.
http://www.inquisite.com/
http://www.aviva-pages.com/survey/

Accessibility/Universal Usability

http://www.w3.org/WAI
http://www.section508.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Content&ID=12
http://www.usability.gov/guidelines/accessibility.html#one
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/depts/facsocsi/acess/tips.htm

Color Pallet:
http://www.iboost.com/build/reference/1045.htm

Testing:
Bobby -- A web site originally produced by the Center for Applied Special Technology that will analyze any web page for conformity with the W3C web content accessibility guidelines. Try it out!

Statistical Tools:

http://stat-www.berkeley.edu/~stark/SticiGui/index.htm

Survey Question Design:

• http://www.web-surveys.net/demo/index.html


• http://www.nooro.com/n/ss01/sample01.asp


• http://www.perseusdevelopment.com/surveytips/samplesurveys.html


• http://www.hostedsurvey.com/Samples.asp


• http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=1246999657 (a web survey -- worth *answering*, given that we've just been talking about these things -- you may or may not want to submit your survey, but try it out to get a user's perspective on the questions. Normally, you would hear about this survey either because you were on their mailing list or because you were visiting their site.)


• http://surveymonkey.com/ (a site that is running the utne survey; follow their "types of questions" link for examples of ways of formatting questions)

Organizations

Marcus, A. (2003). When is a user not a user?: Who are we? What do we do? interactions, 10, 28-34. Useful for his list of conferences and organizations.

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
AIA: American Institute of Architects
AIGA: American Institute of Graphic Arts
HFES: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
ICOGRADA: International Council of Graphic Design Associations
ICSID: International Council of Societies of Industrial Design
IEEE: Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers
IDSA: Industrial Designers Society of America
IIID: International Institute for Information Design
SIGCHI: Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction, a unit of ACM
SIGGRAPH: Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interaction, a unit of ACM
STC: Society for Technical Communication
UPA: Usability Professionals Association

Journals

Bad usability humor

http://www.goodexperience.com/broken/i/03/12/lambs.s.jpg

Handheld & mobile usability

Usability : Handheld & mobile devices - collection of articles

BOOKS

A Practical Guide to Usability Testing, by Joseph S. Dumas, Janice C. Redish. [Published by Intellect, Limited, Oct 1999.]

Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed, by Jakob Nielsen, Marie Tahir. [Published by New Riders Publishing, Nov 2001.]

Contextual Design: A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs, by Hugh Beyer, Karen Holtzblatt. [Published by Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Jul 1998.]

Shaping Web Usability: Interaction Design in Context, Albert Badre. (Read chapter 1 in ACM's Ubiquity.) [Published by Addison-Wesley Longman, Incorporated, Jan 2002.]

User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach by Karel Vredenburg, Scott Isensee, Carol Righi. [Published by Prentice Hall PTR, Dec 2001.]