5 O’Reilly books to boost your UX/Product Design career
Courses and bootcamps are awesome, but in my opinion, the best way to deep dive into an area is by reading professional books about it. O’Reilly one of the biggest and best editorials (personal opinion), has great books to deep dive into UX/Product Design. From the basics of UX Strategies to Behavioral Design content. Let’s see what O’Reilly has for you.
UX Strategy
If you are beginning in this UX/Product Design world I recommend you to read this book first. UX Strategy teach us about UX with real-world examples, most updated techniques and how to conduct qualitative online research (this is my favorite chapter). Why I highly recommend this book is this one teach UX content always connected with the business which in nowadays is kind of difficult to find. Advice: Buy the 2nd edition.
Articulating Design Decisions
One the most difficult parts of our work is talking to clients/stakeholders, specially when they are not designers. In this context, most of the time, is more important how you present your design decisions than the designs themselves. This book will teach you tactics and strategies to deal with different situations when presenting your design decisions. We need to sell our decisions correctly to stakeholders, this book teach us how.
UX Research
No need to have previous experience or knowledge about research to read this book. It goes from the very basics of research to analysis and reporting. What I love of this book is that it isn’t just teach us about quantitative or qualitative methods, how to ask the right questions, etc. It also give us a framework and structure recommendations for how to communicate our research findings. It worths the effort of reading it.
Designing for How People Think
‘UX does not happen on a screen, it happens in the mind’ is the premise of this book. It teach us about the cognitive processes from different brain regions with the ‘Six Minds model’, an incredible method to get useful insights in contextual interviews. Best of this book: it has a lot of examples of how we can use this Six Minds model. Take this book (and the last one in this list) as advanced content, please do not read these ones if you’re a just beginning in this industry.
Designing for Behavior Change
Sounds interesting, right? Yes it is. This book teach us about Behavioral Sciences and how we can apply them to build or improve our product. It combines Behavioral Science with Data Science to find the best solutions for what we need. Learn what Instagram, Uber, and similar companies has done to build great experiences and to help people change behavior.
Hope you find this recommendation useful for your career. Also, feel free to recommend more books connected with these ones.
Cheers!
