10 Best Books on Product Design
Designing products that deliver value, solve a certain user problem, and are easy to use can be a challenge. Fortunately, there are great books that tackle all different kinds of angles in a product design process from user research, to identifying user problems, designing solutions, and validating those hypotheses with users. We’ve collected 10 great books that will help you design great products your customers will love.
The Design of Everyday Things
Revised and Expanded Edition
by Don Norman
Why read?
Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious, even liberating, book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization. The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time.
368 pages, Basic Book 2013
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UX for Lean Startups
Faster, Smarter User Experience Research and Design
by Laura Klein
Why read?
Great user experiences (UX) are essential for products today, but designing one can be a lengthy and expensive process. With this practical, hands-on book, you’ll learn how to do it faster and smarter using Lean UX techniques. UX expert Laura Klein shows you what it takes to gather valuable input from customers, build something they’ll truly love, and reduces the time it takes to get your product to market.
No prior experience in UX or design is necessary to get started. If you’re an entrepreneur or an innovator, this book puts you right to work with proven tips and tools for researching, identifying, and designing an intuitive, easy-to-use product.
233 pages, O’Reilly UK Ltd 2018
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About Face
The Essentials of Interaction Design
by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann & Christopher Noessel
Why read?
This comprehensive guide takes the worldwide shift to smartphones and tablets into account. New information includes discussions on mobile apps, touch interfaces, screen size considerations, and more. The new full-color interior and unique layout better illustrate modern design concepts. The interaction design profession is blooming with the success of design-intensive companies, priming customers to expect “design” as a critical ingredient of marketplace success. Consumers have little tolerance for websites, apps, and devices that don’t live up to their expectations, and the responding shift in business philosophy has become widespread.
720 pages, Wiley 2014
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Design for How People Think
Using Brain Science to Build Better Products
by John Whalen
Why read?
User experience doesn’t happen on a screen; it happens in the mind, and the experience is multidimensional and multisensory. This practical book will help you uncover critical insights about how your customers think so you can create products or services with an exceptional experience.
Corporate leaders, marketers, product owners, and designers will learn how cognitive processes from different brain regions form what we perceive as a singular experience. Author John Whalen shows you how anyone on your team can conduct “contextual interviews” to unlock insights. You’ll then learn how to apply that knowledge to design brilliant experiences for your customers.
240 pages, O’Reilly Media 2019
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Designing Products People Love
How Great Designers Create Successful Products
by Scott Hurff
Why read?
If more product designers, managers, marketers, and start-up founders understood the product-building process, more products would succeed in solving real problems. That’s the purpose of this practical book. By drawing on dozens of interviews with highly effective product designers, Designing Products People Love shows you how successful products are created.
Learn how to discover and interpret customer pain, and how to use that knowledge to guide a team through the iterative creation of a product. Anyone working on a digital product — including designers, entrepreneurs, programmers, executives, and marketers — will find value in understanding how the products they use on a daily basis came to life.
324 pages, O’Reilly Media 2016
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Don’t Make Me Think
A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
by Steve Krug
Why read?
Since Don’t Make Me Think was first published in 2000, hundreds of thousands of Web designers and developers have relied on usability guru Steve Krug’s guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design. Witty, commonsensical, and eminently practical, it’s one of the best-loved and most recommended books on the subject. Now Steve returns with a fresh perspective to reexamine the principles that made Don’t Make Me Think a classic - with updated examples and a new chapter on mobile usability. And it’s still short, profusely illustrated and best of all-fun to read.
216 pages, New Riders 2014
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The Laws of Simplicity
Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life
by John Maeda
Why read?
In The Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda offers ten laws for balancing simplicity and complexity in business, technology, and design-guidelines for needing less and actually getting more. Maeda-a professor at MIT’s Media Lab and a world-renowned graphic designer-explores the question of how we can redefine the notion of “improved” so that it doesn’t always mean something more, something added on.
117 pages, The MIT Press 2006
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Well-Designed
How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love
by Jon Kolko
Why read?
From Design Thinking to Design Doing, Innovators today are told to run loose and think lean in order to fail fast and succeed sooner. But in a world obsessed with the new, where cool added features often trump actual customer needs, it’s the consumer who suffers. In our quest to be more agile, we end up creating products that underwhelm.
In this refreshingly jargon-free and practical book, product design expert Jon Kolko maps out this process, demonstrating how it will help you and your team conceive and build successful, emotionally resonant products again and again. The key, says Kolko, is empathy. You need to deeply understand customer needs and feelings, and this understanding must be reflected in the product.
224 pages, Harvard Business Review Press 2014
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Inclusive Design for a Digital World
Designing with Accessibility in Mind
by Regine M. Gilbert
Why read?
As a creator in the modern digital era, your aim should be to make products that are inclusive of all people. Technology has, overall, increased connection and information equality around the world. To continue its impact, access and usability of such technology must be made a priority, and there is no better place to get started than Inclusive Design for a Digital World.
272 pages, Apress 2020
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Change By Design
How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation
by Tim Brown
Why read?
Tim Brown is the CEO of IDEO, a widely recognised pioneer of Design Thinking.
In this book, Tim Brown reintroduces design thinking, the collaborative process by which the designer’s sensibilities and methods are employed to match people’s needs with what is technically feasible and a viable business strategy. In short, design thinking converts need into demand. It’s a human-centered approach to problem-solving that helps people and organizations become more innovative and creative.
Change by Design is not a book by designers for designers; it is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.
272 pages, Harper Business 2009
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