12 books I’m going to read in 2023 for career and self development
Twelve books for each month of 2023📚
If you are like me, most likely, you also have a folder or a whole bookshelf full of books you want to read someday. I was surprised when I found out that there is even a term to refer to this habit — buying books and don’t read them — Tsundoku.
I have got the idea that I should read one book each month of 2023 for career and personal development, and I’ll share my list with you.
1. The shape of the design
The shape of design has been on my reading list for a long time now. As Amazon describes it, “The Shape of Design is an odd little design book.”
Frank Chimero, the author has 20 years of experience in brand, product design, and creative direction.
“What is the marker of good design? It moves. The story of a successful piece of design begins with the movement of its maker while it is being made, and amplifies by its publishing, moving the work out and around.”
- Frank Chimero
2. Writing is designing
This book is about words that make software human-centered. It promises to show readers how to give your users clarity, how to test their words, and collaborate with their teams.
3. Hooked — How to Build Habit-Forming Products
I’ve seen this book in almost every guide. Hooked is based on the author's years of research, consulting, and practical experience.
He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder — not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behaviour.
4. Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond
Information architecture is a crucial part of user experience design. This book is a guide to this field — it provides readers with essential information about information architecture.
To guide you through this broad ecosystem, this popular guide — now in its fourth edition — provides essential concepts, methods, and techniques for digital design that have withstood the test of time. UX designers, product managers, developers, and anyone involved in digital design will learn how to create semantic structures that will help people engage with your message.
5. Thinking, Fast and Slow
The author, Daniel Kahneman has been awarded the noble prize in economic science. Thinking, fast and slow summarizes his research and is a bestseller.
6. Designing for People: An Introduction to Human Factors Engineering
“Whether it is the car you drive or the app on your smartphone, technology has an increasingly powerful influence on you. When designed with people in mind, this influence can improve lives and productivity. This book provides a broad introduction on how to attend to the needs, capabilities, and preferences of people in the design process.”
Amazon
7. Atomic Habits
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard about this book. Maybe it’s not directly related to design, like other books from my list, but it’s about self-development. Self-development is a huge part of our life and I want to find out, is this book that magical?
Read my article here 👇🏻
8. Why we fail
“Just as pilots and doctors improve by studying crash reports and postmortems, experience designers can improve by learning how customer experience failures cause products to fail in the marketplace. Rather than proselytizing a particular approach to design, Why We Fail holistically explores what teams actually built, why the products failed, and how we can learn from the past to avoid failure ourselves.”
Amazon
9. UX fundamentals for non-UX professionals
Although the book specifically says that it’s for non-UX professionals, I think it will be a valuable source for aspiring UX designers. The author promises that book is full of entertaining, real-world examples to demonstrate the importance of design.
10. The User’s Journey: Storymapping Products People Love
“Like a good story, successful design is a series of engaging moments structured over time. The User’s Journey will show you how, when, and why to use narrative structure, technique, and principles to ideate, craft, and test a cohesive vision for an engaging outcome. See how a “story first” approach can transform your product, feature, landing page, flow, campaign, content, or product strategy.”
Amazon
11. Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People
With engaging narratives and ample illustrations, Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein investigate cognitive tools as diverse as observing, imaging, recognizing patterns, modeling, playing, and more to provide “a clever, detailed and demanding fitness program for the creative mind”
Kirkus Reviews
12. Nudge
I bought this book probably in the most beautiful bookshop I’ve ever seen, full of hundreds of thousands of books. It was by the end of my traveling and I was short on money, so I chose only two books — Nudge and Mythos.
The reason I want to read this book was the description.
“The original edition of the multimillion-copy New York Times bestseller by the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Richard H. Thaler, and Cass R. Sunstein: a revelatory look at how we make decisions — for fans of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, James Clear’s Atomic Habits, and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow”
Amazon
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