The UX Resources I Still Use All the Time
A friend of mine is taking over a new Product Manager role where he will have responsibility for a lot of user-centered design work like basic usability testing, persona creation, experience mapping, and anything else that would qualify as “lean UX.”
He asked me what books, blogs, podcasts, etc. he should check out to start building some UX chops. That got me thinking…
…of all the UX books, blogs, websites, talks, seminars, quotes, etc. I’ve seen and heard over the years, which do I still use?
Not necessarily the absolute best or the “classics.” No format requirements, they can be books, blogs, or Pinterest boards. They just have to be the resources with the most longevity and consistent usefulness for me so far. Here’s my list.
Zero to one
These are the big ideas to contextualize your UX work and simple steps to get started.
On Product/Market Fit for Startups. Please, please, please, start here. This is key. Avoid the mistake of building a usable and beautiful product that no one wants or needs.
The Design of Everyday Things. Classic for a reason. I think about how to “use both knowledge in the world and in the head” daily. There’s even a FREE Udacity course based on the book now.
Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design. Timeless. Holding your UX to these principles will get you pretty far.
Google Ventures Design Blog, especially their stuff on Design Sprints. Seriously, these guys tell you how to make quality improvements to your UX quickly. Often in a simple-to-follow checklist to go through. Just do everything they say.
Agile stories as a unit of analysis. Not a book or blog but a tool to breakdown UX work. They are a nice way to set the “unit of analysis” for planning, designing, and evaluating UX. They look like this:
“As a <role>, I want to <goal/desire>, so that <benefit>.”
What is really nice is they separate the how — the goal/desire- from the what — the benefit.
Building the Minimum Badass User. Talk by Kathy Sierra that nails it. This can fundamentally shift the way you approach UX. The short version is one of my favorite UX graphics ever:
One to one-you’re-actually-proud-of
OK, now that the foundation is there, it’s time to iterate and hone your craft.
The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design. Ostensibly a book about personas, this lays out all of the steps of user-centered design in a lot of detail. Great advice and examples for doing quality UX work and making sure that work ships throughout the book. I re-read it about two years ago when I was defining some personas and was shocked how many pages I dogeared and how many margins I wrote in.
Little Big Details. Daily examples of adding craft and personality to UX. They range from clever to hilarious to my personal favorite — touches that once you see them you say, “Why doesn’t everyone just do that?”
User Journey examples on Pinterest like this one. Walking through a user journey with your team is magic. These walkthroughs are magic because they make clear so many emotions, expectations, gaps, and dependencies in your UX and larger context. It basically gives everyone in the room 10 free IQ points.
MeasuringU. Jeff Sauro’s blog on measuring UX. Tons of posts on how to quantify UX. More importantly, lots of posts on how to match the right research method with research questions.
Julie Zhuo’s Medium posts. Mostly geared to larger product groups but still valuable to small teams. My favorite are her takes on what separates effective and less effective designers (i.e. junior and senior designers).
IDEO’s Human-centered Design Toolkit. A great guide through the human-centered design approach for people of all experience levels. Paired along the way with practical methods to implement the ideas at each stage.
fuckjetpacks.com. This was a short-lived blog from 2012–2014 that had a series of very insightful posts on interaction design. The blog is now shuttered but you can still look through the cached posts.
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Most of these ideas have permeated the collective UX consciousness at this point but I still look in my dogeared copy all the time. A great framework to think about the defaults in your UX and how to nudge people’s behaviors through design.
Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work. The ideas in this book are great for both team decision-making and for thinking about the decisions you ask people who use your product to make.
Internal UX teams. This is only applicable if you have a team of designers or researchers to lean on but just having a group of people to ask questions to or bounce ideas off of is priceless. If you don’t have a design, user research, or UX team at your company, there are plenty of groups on sites like Linkedin or Quora with people happy to help.
Quotes, sayings, mantras, laws, and the like
I like pithy quotes a lot. I relate to a lot of “new” problems through them. Here are some that seem to keep coming back up for me and guide my decision making.
“What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.”
Margaret Mead. I think about this quote multiple times a day and repeat it whenever possible.
“A good motto for designing interactions is to evaluate early, often, and as late as possible.”
Bill Moggridge. Self-explanatory.
“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”
Henry Ford quoted in “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, Carnegie, 1937. This is much better than the “faster horses” one that has no evidence Ford actually said.
“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
William Gibson (1993). Good reminder to poke your head up and look around once in a while. You might find the solution to your problem already solved in another domain.
“User research is about the possibility of UX.”
Gayna Williams as told to me by Steve Scallen (unknown date). I love this reminder than UX research isn’t just about finding what’s wrong in a design, but what the possibilities of the design fulfilling are.
That’s the list
That’s it for me. It was really fun looking through all of these resources and thinking about why some have stuck with me and been applicable in so many domains.
This is just my take. Really interested to hear what resources have stood the test of time for other folks.
