10 Best Books on UX Design & Research
1. Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Create Extraordinary Products for Tomorrow’s Customers by Jan Chipchase and Simon Steinhardt
Hidden in Plain Sight by global innovation consultant Jan Chipchase with Simon Steinhardt is a fascinating look at how consumers think and behave.
Chipchase, named by Fortune as “one of the 50 smartest people in tech,” has traveled the world, studying people of all nations and their habits, paying attention to the ordinary things that we do every day an how they effect our buying decisions.
Future-focused and provocative, Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Create Extraordinary Products for Tomorrow’s Customers illuminates exactly what drives consumers to make the choices they do, and demonstrates how all types of businesses can learn to see — and capitalize upon — what is hidden in plain sight today to create businesses tomorrow.
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2. Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights by Steve Portigal
Interviewing is a foundational user research tool that people assume they already possess. Everyone can ask questions, right? Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Interviewing Users provides invaluable interviewing techniques and tools that enable you to conduct informative interviews with anyone. You’ll move from simply gathering data to uncovering powerful insights about people.
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3. UX for Lean Startups: Faster, Smarter User Experience Research and Design by Laura Klein
Great user experiences (UX) are essential for products today, but designing one can be a lengthy and expensive process. With this practical, hands-on book, you’ll learn how to do it faster and smarter using Lean UX techniques. UX expert Laura Klein shows you what it takes to gather valuable input from customers, build something they’ll truly love, and reduce the time it takes to get your product to market.
No prior experience in UX or design is necessary to get started. If you’re an entrepreneur or an innovator, this book puts you right to work with proven tips and tools for researching, identifying, and designing an intuitive, easy-to-use product.
- Determine whether people will buy your product before you build it
- Listen to your customers throughout the product’s lifecycle
- Understand why you should design a test before you design a product
- Get nine tools that are critical to designing your product
- Discern the difference between necessary features and nice-to-haves
- Learn how a Minimum Viable Product affects your UX decisions
- Use A/B testing in conjunction with good UX practices
- Speed up your product development process without sacrificing quality
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4. Universal Methods of Design: 100 Ways to Research Complex Problems, Develop Innovative Ideas, and Design Effective Solutions by Bruce Hanington and Bella Martin
This comprehensive reference provides a thorough and critical presentation of 100 research methods, synthesis/analysis techniques, and research deliverables for human centered design, delivered in a concise and accessible format perfect for designers, educators, and students.
Universal Methods of Design serves as an invaluable compendium of methods that can be easily referenced and used by cross-disciplinary teams in nearly any design project.
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5. Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests by Jeffrey Rubin
Whether it’s software, a cell phone, or a refrigerator, your customer wants — no, expects — your product to be easy to use. This fully revised handbook provides clear, step-by-step guidelines to help you test your product for usability. Completely updated with current industry best practices, it can give you that all-important marketplace advantage: products that perform the way users expect. You’ll learn to recognize factors that limit usability, decide where testing should occur, set up a test plan to assess goals for your product’s usability, and more.
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6. Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research by Mike Kuniavsky
Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research aims to bridge the gap between what digital companies think they know about their users and the actual user experience. Individuals engaged in digital product and service development often fail to conduct user research. The book presents concepts and techniques to provide an understanding of how people experience products and services. The techniques are drawn from the worlds of human-computer interaction, marketing, and social sciences.
The book is organized into three parts. Part I discusses the benefits of end-user research and the ways it fits into the development of useful, desirable, and successful products. Part II presents techniques for understanding people’s needs, desires, and abilities. Part III explains the communication and application of research results. It suggests ways to sell companies and explains how user-centered design can make companies more efficient and profitable. This book is meant for people involved with their products’ user experience, including program managers, designers, marketing managers, information architects, programmers, consultants, and investors.
- Explains how to create usable products that are still original, creative, and unique
- A valuable resource for designers, developers, project managers — anyone in a position where their work comes in direct contact with the end user
- Provides a real-world perspective on research and provides advice about how user research can be done cheaply, quickly and how results can be presented persuasively
- Gives readers the tools and confidence to perform user research on their own designs and tune their software user experience to the unique needs of their product and its users
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7. Quantifying the User Experience: Practical Statistics for User Research by Jeff Sauro and James R Lewis
The book discusses ways to quantify user research; summarize data and compute margins of error; determine appropriate samples sizes; standardize usability questionnaires; and settle controversies in measurement and statistics. Each chapter concludes with a list of key points and references. Most chapters also include a set of problems and answers that enable readers to test their understanding of the material. This book is a valuable resource for those engaged in measuring the behavior and attitudes of people during their interaction with interfaces.
- Provides practical guidance on solving usability testing problems with statistics for any project, including those using Six Sigma practices
- Show practitioners which test to use, why they work, best practices in application, along with easy-to-use excel formulas and web-calculators for analyzing data
- Recommends ways for practitioners to communicate results to stakeholders in plain English
- Resources and tools available at the authors’ site: http://www.measuringu.com/
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8. It’s Our Research: Getting Stakeholder Buy-in for User Experience Research Projects by Tomer Sharon
This book consists of six chapters arranged according to the different stages of research projects. Topics discussed include the different roles of business, engineering, and user-experience stakeholders; identification of research opportunities by developing empathy with stakeholders; and planning UX research with stakeholders. The book also offers ways of teaming up with stakeholders; strategies to improve the communication of research results to stakeholders; and the nine signs that indicate that research is making an impact on stakeholders, teams, and organizations.
This book is meant for UX people engaged in usability and UX research. Written from the perspective of an in-house UX researcher, it is also relevant for self-employed practitioners and consultants who work in agencies. It is especially directed at UX teams that face no-time-no-money-for-research situations.
- Named a 2012 Notable Computer Book for Information Systems by Computing Reviews
- Features a series of video interviews with UX practitioners and researchers
- Provides dozens of case studies and visuals from international research practitioners
- Provides a toolset that will help you justify your work to stakeholders, deal with office politics, and hone your client skills
- Presents tried and tested techniques for working to reach positive, useful, and fruitful outcomes
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9. Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics by William Albert and Thomas Tullis
Measuring the User Experience was the first book that focused on how to quantify the user experience. Now in the second edition, the authors include new material on how recent technologies have made it easier and more effective to collect a broader range of data about the user experience.
As more UX and web professionals need to justify their design decisions with solid, reliable data, Measuring the User Experience provides the quantitative analysis training that these professionals need. The second edition presents new metrics such as emotional engagement, personas, keystroke analysis, and net promoter score. It also examines how new technologies coming from neuro-marketing and online market research can refine user experience measurement, helping usability and user experience practitioners make business cases to stakeholders. The book also contains new research and updated examples, including tips on writing online survey questions, six new case studies, and examples using the most recent version of Excel.
- Learn which metrics to select for every case, including behavioral, physiological, emotional, aesthetic, gestural, verbal, and physical, as well as more specialized metrics such as eye-tracking and clickstream data
- Find a vendor-neutral examination of how to measure the user experience with web sites, digital products, and virtually any other type of product or system
- Discover in-depth global case studies showing how organizations have successfully used metrics and the information they revealed
- Companion site, www.measuringux.com, includes articles, tools, spreadsheets, presentations, and other resources to help you effectively measure the user experience
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10. Just Enough Research by Erika Hall
Design research is a hard slog that takes years to learn and time away from the real work of design, right? Wrong. Good research is about asking more and better questions, and thinking critically about the answers. It’s something every member of your team can and should do, and which everyone can learn, quickly. And done well, it will save you time and money by reducing unknowns and creating a solid foundation to build the right thing, in the most effective way. In Just Enough Research, co-founder of Mule Design Erika Hall distills her experience into a brief cookbook of research methods. Learn how to discover your competitive advantages, spot your own blind spots and biases, understand and harness your findings, and why you should never, ever hold a focus group. You’ll start doing good research faster than you can plan your next pitch. Erika Hall has been working in web design and development since the late 20th century. In 2001, she co-founded Mule Design Studio where she directs the research, interaction design, and strategy practices. Erika speaks and writes frequently about cross-disciplinary collaboration and the importance of natural language in user interfaces. In her spare time, she battles empty corporate jargon at Unsuck It. She also co-hosts Running from the Law, a weekly podcast on business law and endurance fitness, and can probably outrun you.
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