15 Must-Read UX Books
curated by repick.co
The UX design process is becoming an increasingly important aspect of creating quality website applications and software products. There are a lot of great books on UX and Usability these days. Heres 15 of our favorite UX Books of all time
The Design of Everyday Things
This book changed the field of design. As the pace of technological change accelerates, the principles in this book are increasingly important. The new examples and ideas about design and product development make it essential reading.
100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People
Designers might be great at designing beautiful work, but if they don’t understand people, their work won’t have the impact they want. This book helps users learn about consumer behavior and needs, and how to tap into those elements through design.
The Non-Designer’s Design Book
For nearly 20 years, designers and non-designers a like have been introduced to the fundamental principles of great design by author Robin Williams. Through her straightforward and light-hearted style, Robin has taught hundreds of thousands of people how to make their designs look professional using four surprisingly simple principles.
Don’t make me think
Don’t Make Me Think is a book by Steve Krug about human–computer interaction and web usability. The book’s premise is that a good software program or web site should let users accomplish their intended tasks as easily and directly as possible.
Usable Usability: Simple Steps for Making Stuff Better
Frustrated by pop-ups? Forms that make you start over if you miss a field? Nonsensical error messages? You’re not alone! This book helps you simply get it right the first time (or fix what’s broken). Boasting a full-color interior packed with design and layout examples, this book teaches you how to understand a user’s needs, divulges techniques for exceeding a user’s expectations, and provides a host of hard won advice for improving the overall quality of a user’s experience.
Service Design: From Insight to Implementation
This book is a great introduction to service design by people who shaped this approach from its early years on. It explains many established tools and methods with encouraging real-life cases. The authors succeed in generating a mix of inspiring hands-on examples that motivates the reader to instantly try some of the methods, while its content is based on well-researched scholarly literature.
Measuring the User Experience
This book is a great resource about the many ways you can gather usability metrics without busting your budget. If you’re ready to take your user experience career to the next level of professionalism, Tullis and Albert are here for you and share generously of their vast experience. Highly recommended.
Designing for Interaction
This book will help you learn to create a design strategy that differentiates your product from the competition use design research to uncover people’s behaviors, motivations, and goals in order to design for them employ brainstorming best practices to create innovative new products and solutions understand the process and methods used to define product behavior It also offers interviews and case studies from industry leaders on prototyping, designing in an Agile environment, service design, ubicomp, robots, and more.
Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams
Lean UX has become the preferred approach to interaction design, tailor-made for today’s agile teams. In the second edition of this award winning book, leading advocates Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden expand on the valuable Lean UX principles, tactics, and techniques covered in the first edition to share how product teams can easily incorporate design, experimentation, iteration, and continuous learning from real users into their Agile process.
Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design
“Sketching User Experiences” approaches design and design thinking as something distinct that needs to be better understood-by both designers and the people with whom they need to work- in order to achieve success with new products and systems. So while the focus is on design, the approach is holistic. Hence, the book speaks to designers, usability specialists, the HCI community, product managers, and business executives.
Smashing UX Design
“Smashing Magazine” is the world′s most popular resource for web designers and developers and with this book the authors provide the ideal resource for mastering User Experience Design.
Universal Principles of Design
This book took my love affair with design and sealed the deal. It is exactly what it says it is, and is worth every penny. While art is subjective and everyone’s a critic, design is different, relying on rules and guidelines that lead to more frequent success, and so this book provides both beginning and lifetime designers with a reliable set of universal principles that can improve the outcome of any project.
Emotional Design: Why We Love /Hate Everyday Things
Emotional Design is both the title of a book by Donald Norman and of the concept it represents. The main topic covered is how emotions have a crucial role in the human ability to understand the world, and how they learn new things.
A Project Guide to UX Design
User experience design is the discipline of creating a useful and usable Web site or application that’s easily navigated and meets the needs of the site owner and its users. There’s a lot more to successful UX design than knowing the latest Web technologies or design trends: It takes diplomacy, management skills, and business savvy.
The Humane Interface
This unique guide to interactive system design reflects the experience and vision of Jef Raskin, the creator of the Apple Macintosh. Other books may show how to use today’s widgets and interface ideas effectively. Raskin, however, demonstrates that many current interface paradigms are dead ends, and that to make computers significantly easier to use requires new approaches. He explains how to effect desperately needed changes, offering a wealth of innovative and specific interface ideas for software designers, developers, and product managers.
These are all UX Books we recommend. We’d love to hear what your favourites are and how they helped you improve your design process.Thanks for reading!