Usability Engineering

Where Card, Moran, and Newell gave HCI its theoretical foundation, Nielsen gave it a pragmatic engineering methodology. This book codified usability heuristics, discount usability testing, severity ratings for defects, and the economics of when and how to evaluate interfaces within the constraints of real schedules and budgets. Nielsen's ten heuristics — visibility of system status, match between system and real world, user control and freedom, among others — remain the most widely used inspection checklist in the field thirty years later. The book is rigorous without being academic, and it treats usability as a measurable property of software rather than a matter of taste. For product managers who need to argue for quality with data rather than opinion, the framework here is still the most efficient starting point.