I buy a lot of books. Coding manuals, design guides and even personal development books. To be honest, I usually start off with good intentions, read the first chapter or two, get distracted and that's as far as I get.

But two books have stood out for me as absolute must reads and I have literally read them cover to cover and back again.

The first one was Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen. I came upon it purely by chance whilst having a look around the brilliant Waterstones in Picadilly, London. I wasn't aware of the time that Neilsen is a highly regarded expert on usability in technology. This book made me stop in my tracks and really consider for the first time about how important it is to have a website which as many as people as possible can access, and how essential it is to know that your user has certain expectations of how a website should work, and when you mess with those expectations too much, you risk using your user. This book taught me about the integrity of the web page metaphor, and the importance of the hyperlink. It made me consider the best ways to quickly display to the user the information they were seeking, with the most minimal amount of clicks.

It's no lie to say I consumed this book avidly and still refer back to it. Once you're in that state of mind, putting usability and function as a priority, it's hard not to feel anything but disdain for Flash sites with odd custom navigation sites which might just about be usable to someone who is higly web aware but will make little sense to many other people.

I worked in a job once where they had come up with a new corporate website. It was flash based and had some arrow based mechanism on the left hand side that let the user scroll up and down the visible text. Now, you have only got to look at any computer application to see that common convention is for a standard scroll bar on the right hand side, which not only lets you scroll up and down but also to judge how close to the bottom you are and how tall the page is. To consider throwing away that common convention is surely bizarre and can only be confusing your users. This is an example of where design forgets about its users.

The second book that is up in there in my must-read-every-word selection is... Prioritising Web Usability by - you guessed it - Jakob Nielsen assisted by Hoa Loranger. This book only came out a few months ago and is the sequel to Designing Web Usability.

He has updated his advice to take into account developments in technology, and user awareness of the web. He revisits recommendations in the first book to assess how relevant they are today as a uability problem. For instance, in his first book, he was very hot on hyperlinks preferably being blue and underlined. In his new book, he recognises - after thorough testing sessions - that the user awareness level of how the web works has moved on such that you no longer need to keep a hyperlink blue but he reminds the designer that it is still critical to keep the visited link as a different colour so as not to confuse the reader and cause them to visit the same pages twice. That's just an example of the kind of thing this book is about. Essentially its about meeting your user's expectations of a website and allowing them to get the most from it.

I don't really consider myself as a graphic designer, so it probably suits me in a way to focus on function and usability (even though I do slip up myself sometimes), but it does seem to make business sense: if you enable as many people, with as wide a range of computer skills as possible, to access the information you have, then you can create more sales opportunities. I don't follow all of Nielsen's advice all of the time - I often find myself taking shortcuts or being a bit slapdash - but these books act like a conscience and I know I'm being bad with those shortcuts and have it in mind that I will revisit that piece of dev and make it better.

Find out more about the work of Jakob Neilsen at his website - www.useit.com.

If you want to check out these books, you find them on Amazon:

Designing Web Usability - Jakon Nielsen
Prioritizing Web Usability - Jakob Nielsen & Hoa Loranger