What UX Professionals Are Reading — Pt.1
A compilation of books from professionals in the UX industry
As a student of UX design, I was given the opportunity to attend the UX Strat conference in Boulder, CO this past September. I decided to take advantage of all of the talent and great minds in the room, and asked the attending group of professionals to help me create a list of books aspiring and current UX designers should read. I wanted to share this list with all of you, so here goes:
- Understanding Context, Andrew Hinton — “This practical, insightful book provides a powerful toolset to help information architects, UX professionals, and web and app designers understand and solve the many challenges of contextual ambiguity in the products and services they create. You’ll discover not only how to design for a given context, but also how design participates in making context.”
2. Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, Ian Bogost — “In Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, Ian Bogost develops an object-oriented ontology that puts things at the center of being — a philosophy in which nothing exists any more or less than anything else, in which humans are elements but not the sole or even primary elements of philosophical interest.”
3. Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary, Dan Hill — “In this short book, Dan Hill outlines a new vocabulary of design, one that needs to be smuggled into the upper echelons of power. He asserts that, increasingly, effective design means engaging with the messy politics — the dark matter” — taking place above the designer’s head.”
4. The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, Robert I. Sutton — “Stanford University professor Robert I. Sutton builds on his acclaimed Harvard Business Review article to show you the best ways to deal with assholes…and why they can be so destructive to your company.”
5. Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously, Jeff Gothelf — “Now, organizations are emerging, and thriving, based on their capacity to sense and respond instantly to customer and employee behaviors. In Sense and Respond, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, leading tech experts and founders of the global Lean UX movement, vividly show how these companies operate, highlighting the new mindset and skills needed to lead and manage them — and to continuously innovate within them.”
6. Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, Kim Scott — “Radical Candor is a simple idea: to be a good boss, you have to Care Personally at the same time that you Challenge Directly. When you challenge without caring it’s obnoxious aggression; when you care without challenging it’s ruinous empathy. When you do neither it’s manipulative insincerity.”
7. Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams, Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner — “Design has become the key link between users and today’s complex and rapidly evolving digital experiences, and designers are starting to be included in strategic conversations about the products and services that enterprises ultimately deliver. This has led to companies building in-house digital/experience design teams at unprecedented rates, but many of them don’t understand how to get the most out of their investment. This practical guide provides guidelines for creating and leading design teams within your organization, and explores ways to use design as part of broader strategic planning.”
8. Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best… and Learn from the Worst, Robert I. Sutton — “As Dr. Sutton digs into the nitty-gritty of what the best (and worst) bosses do, a theme runs throughout Good Boss, Bad Boss — which brings together the diverse lessons and is a hallmark of great bosses: They work doggedly to “stay in tune” with how their followers (and superiors, peers, and customers too) react to what they say and do. The best bosses are acutely aware that their success depends on having the self-awareness to control their moods and moves, to accurately interpret their impact on others, and to make adjustments on the fly that continuously spark effort, dignity, and pride among their people.”
9. Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days, Jake Knapp — “A practical guide to answering business questions, Sprint is a book for groups of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers and PTAs to nonprofits and public institutions. It’s for anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers today.”
10. On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines, Jeff Hawkins — “Hawkins develops a powerful theory of how the human brain works, explaining why computers are not intelligent and how, based on this new theory, we can finally build intelligent machines.
The brain is not a computer, but a memory system that stores experiences in a way that reflects the true structure of the world, remembering sequences of events and their nested relationships and making predictions based on those memories. It is this memory-prediction system that forms the basis of intelligence, perception, creativity, and even consciousness.”
11. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman — “Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation―each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.”
12. How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom, Garry Kasparov — “Garry Kasparov was the highest-rated chess player in the world for over twenty years and is widely considered the greatest player that ever lived…He relates in a lively, original way all the fundamentals, from the nuts and bolts of strategy, evaluation, and preparation to the subtler, more human arts of developing a personal style and using memory, intuition, imagination and even fantasy. Kasparov takes us through the great matches of his career, including legendary duels against both man (Grandmaster Anatoly Karpov) and machine (IBM chess supercomputer Deep Blue), enhancing the lessons of his many experiences with examples from politics, literature, sports and military history.”
13. Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through The Wilds of Strategic Management, Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand, Joseph Lampel — “Strategy Safari makes sense of a field that often seems to make no sense. Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel pair their sweeping vision of strategy making with an authoritative catalog in which they identify ten schools of strategy that have emerged over the past four decades.”
14. The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb — “A black swan is an event, positive or negative, that is deemed improbable yet causes massive consequences. In this groundbreaking and prophetic book, Taleb shows in a playful way that Black Swan events explain almost everything about our world, and yet we — especially the experts — are blind to them. In this second edition, Taleb has added a new essay, On Robustness and Fragility, which offers tools to navigate and exploit a Black Swan world.”
I myself am trying to work through this list currently — it’s a pretty long one! But I like that the books cover general skills that help strengthen you as a UX designer and a leader, and that you could learn from them no matter what stage of your career you are in. Stay tuned for Part 2, coming soon.
