My new favorite book is The Design of Sites, Second Edition. Not only does it eruditely cover just about any topic in User Experience Design that I could think of; but, it is the most user-friendly book.

I must say part of my excitement about this may be due to my Scandinavian roots, but it may also be because I wrote User Interface Guidelines for about two years. The Norwegian Ministry of Trade and Industry has written some remarkable guidelines on designing simplified forms on the internet. It’s called ELMER 2 (PDF - 1 MB) and if I’d had something like this when I started out, it would have been my secret weapon on designing input forms .

Not only that, but it’s a very tight example of design documentation - putting the guidelines in a tabular format with cross references and clear examples. It also has a glossary of terms used in the document (for example, “inline error” and “standardized text”.) So simple even a blond could use it!

And don’t forget, as the document footer says… “In case of discrepency, the Norwegian version prevails.”