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Here’s a great listing of books on Usability. Here are some books I highly recommend from the list:

Universal Principles of Design: 100 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach Through Design, by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler (buy in the U.S. or buy in the U.K.)
As the title says: a description of a hundred basic principles of usability and design. Few of these will be new to you, but it’s good to have them collected in one place with simple description and a few illustrative examples of each principle. Serves as a nice checklist to read through as you are thinking about the usability of a design problem. For example, one technique is “highlighting”: the book gives the guideline to highlight no more than 10% of the information and lists five common ways to highlight (bold, different typeface, color, inverting, and blinking). Reading this short description may give rise to the following questions about your design: Did we highlight something that users should be directed to give special attention? Did we highlight too much? Did we use the best highlighting technique for the context, or should we use one of the others?

The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman (buy in the U.S. or buy in the U.K.)
This book is the best introduction to the importance of usability in design: much of the value comes from the fact that it is not about computers but about all kinds of other things that we suffer from every day (even nerds can identify with the examples in this book, though they usually claim that “well, typing mumble-foo-META-F4 is not that hard to remember” when confronted with an example of bad user interface design). This is the paperback edition. The hardcover edition was entitled The Psychology of Everyday Things, leading to the often-cited acronym POET. The two editions are the same despite the different titles.

Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things, by Donald A. Norman (buy in the U.S. or buy in the U.K.)
Don Norman presents his theory of the three levels at which people engage with designs: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. Many traditional appearance designers have focused on the visceral level, usability has traditionally been strongest at the behavioral level, and many marketing experts have focused on the branding aspects of reflective design (while ignoring other angels of how people think about their personal history of using products). Norman brings it all together in a unified theory of design. The book is the most useful for readers who are designing physical objects where the visceral level has more dimensions to work with and where users also get more time to engage the reflective level. Web design is more dominated by the behavioral level, but the other two certainly matter as well.

Usability Engineering, by Jakob Nielsen (revised paperback edition). Buy from Amazon USA or buy from Amazon U.K.
Basic textbook that covers the entire usability engineering lifecycle from early product conceptualization through design and evaluation to field installation and follow-up studies. This book focuses on the practical methods that can be applied at each step with a particular emphasis on “discount usability engineering” methods that can be used despite the most severe deadlines and budget restraints. The full table of contents is online

Usability Marathon is a series of webinars in usability and user experience (UX), opens on Monday, October 12, 2009 and goes through Wednesday, October 21, 2009. It is organized for the second time by UIDesign Group (Moscow, Russia), however, this year the event will be held solely online.

The Usability Marathon 2009 will consist of a series of free online webinars. The webinars are scheduled according to Moscow time; however the online format enables participants from all over the world to attend.

Each guest speaker is an exceedingly experienced international professional from countries including the United States, Germany, Australia, and China. They are leaders in user experience, usability research and interaction design, authors of popular books and publications, participants in the largest conferences, or chief consultants and directors of UX companies.

The Marathon audience is both experienced and novice usability and UX specialists, interaction designers, developers, project managers, UX team leaders and managers of companies developing digital products and services.

Registration for the webinars is now open at the event’s website: http://marathon.uidesign.ru

I’ll be attending most of the online webinars, but for those interested, these are the few in particular I think will be great:

Selling UX
Daniel Szuc | Apogee, Hong Kong, China

Imagine we need to sell UX to an organization. Not all organizations have the same level of interest and receptiveness to UX. Some just don’t care.

What should we know about an organization that will help us sell UX more effectively? What sort of questions should we ask about the organization, its people and its culture? What can we learn from organizations where UX has become part of the corporate DNA? What factors can increase our chances of promoting UX successfully to an organization now and in the future?

This presentation will tap into more than 10 years of experience in selling UX into different markets and organizations. We will share the successes, pitfalls and failures.

UX Vision, Strategy and Teams
Susan Wolfe | Optimal Experience, Australia

Many organizations try to apply user experience (UX) expertise and best practice principles to their design and development processes. However, when done as discrete activities on particular projects, it is rarely yields a truly satisfying result in the end. To be successful, an overall UX vision must first be established for the organization, and a strategy for realizing that vision must be developed. It’s only then that the organization stands a chance to create a single, consistent face to its customers.

The challenges of doing so are many, including creating the vision and then enabling different groups such as product development, marketing and customer service to deliver on that common vision. During the webinar, Susan will draw upon her extensive experience as well as the result of surveys with successful user-centered design and UX teams worldwide to share practical approaches to creating and implementing such a strategy.

Measuring User Efficiency
Jeff Sauro | Oracle, USA

How long does it take to complete a task? Obtaining task time metrics is important for benchmarking and improving the efficiency of an interface. Conducting summative usability tests to gather these metrics is expensive and usually comes too late in the development cycle to make changes. Using a modification of Keystroke Level Modeling Jeff will show how to accurately estimate experienced users task times using only screen shots and prototypes.