Do usability books still matter?
Here’s an admission: I don’t read usability books.
This isn’t a proclamation of anti-intellectualism; it’s the result of a deficit of time. In the past I’ve worried a lot about not having read all the books I “should” read, but the transition into this new decade has me wondering: Does it really matter?
Think about the blistering speed of change these days (duh). Think about the technologies at our fingertips that allows us keep up on morphing trends in usability. We have Twitter, RSS feeds, mailing lists, white papers, and so on.
Hopefully, all usability people are actively reading and sharing articles socially, attending conferences and webinars when budget allows it, participating in local usability group presentations—oh, not to mention spending their day deep in the trenches. Given this, is it crucial in 2010 to hunker down with usability books at night, highlighter in hand, in order to keep in tip-top professional shape?
And is it critical to have read the “classic” usability tomes to know what’s what?
If you’ve gleaned and internalized the underlying principles of usability, allow yourself to be flexible to the intricacies of context and are open to change, do you really need books, where information/ideas can be dated while the ink’s still drying?
This recent critique of Jakob Neilsen’s new eyetracking book illustrates my point. As does a few coworkers’ criticism of the need for the recent Smashing Magazine book about best practices in modern Web design (not that it doesn’t look gorgeous).
Does the inherent datedness of print nullify its importance or at least our need to consume it?
