The Essential Guide to User Interface Design: An Introduction to GUI Design Principles and Techniques

This text has a few glitches (still recommending frames for web navigation) and odd bits of terminology, but this is partly because of the author's deep roots in UI design--he wrote the first predecessor of this book thirty years ago. It is an affordable and fairly thorough compendium of design advice for screen-based interfaces, including references to the literature whenever research evidence is available. Suffers from the "Principles" chapter (Step 3) being almost 200 pages long (hard to read straight through), but a brief outline at the beginning of each guideline throughout the book makes the book surprisingly skimmable for its length. Things that are missing: treatment of mobile devices, typography.