Robby on Rails

Not explicitly for the web, but one of the classic texts in usability is The Design of Everyday Things. Powells will most certainly have it in stock, and it is an enjoyable and eductional read before you dive headlong into the moutains of articles written by people who learned Fitts’ Law and became an expert :)

Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think

I second the Don’t Make Me Think suggestion.

Q&A is “question and answer” or else an old database software package – which was really popular in its day.

Surely you mean QA. :) But that’s not helpful.

Anyway, I can talk to you about QA as it relates to game development, but maybe some of it will transfer. The key in my work is good testers. These guys can break anything, and they’re decent at providing good reproduction instructions. If we have that much, fixing a bug is easy. The bad news is that these guys are the rare few.

Also, it helps to have a solid testing plan lined out for your testers. Of course they should have direct access to the bugs, and communication with the programmers should be wide open. FogBugz (or similar) simple systems work well enough.

Bugs should be prioritized, and know that you will release with bugs. Just figure our which ones. At least on a console game anyway.

Like I said – don’t know if it helps, but there ya go.

Yes, Don’t Make Me Think is the book you (and everybody else working with web UI) should read!

Chalk up another vote for “Don’t Make Me Think” and “The Design of Everyday Things”. Also worth a look is “Defensive Design for the Web” by the 37Signals guys. I just picked up a copy of “Web ReDesign 2.0 – Workflow That Works” and it appears to have a lot of information on those topics as well.