My Favorite UX Book
When we began this blog I was a little worried that I’d never proclaim one UX book to be my favorite. There are so many good ones and there are so many different topics that books fall under. How could I pick just one? But, after many years and even more books, I think it is time to tell you about my favorite: Interaction Design by Sharp, Rogers, and Preece.
It isn’t the book for everyone when they first become interested in UX. It is much more like a text book. For that reason I don’t really recommend it for anyone who is flirting with the idea of moving into UX. For something like that I am much more likely to recommend something by Norman or Krug. This book is the book that would follow one of those if the person was still interested.
I love this book for a handful of reasons. For me it is the super fun and easy to digest text book of how to do everything that you could do and still call it “User Experience.” The book steps the reader through the entire lifecycle of user experience starting at the beginning with data gathering and stepping all the way through to analysis and usability evaluations. It also does a great job of presenting both qualitative and quantitative methods in equal measure and discussing the pros and cons of both. I liked the balanced approach because depending on the research papers I’d read quantitative methods were overly reductive and qualitative methods were costly and flighty. This book was the first one I’d read to present a coherent argument about why they are both valuable and when to use each.
I’m such a fan of the book I own at least three different editions. I keep returning to the book and reading it with others. UX is an evolving field and the book evolves as well. I enjoy seeing the updates. It is also super cheap for what you are getting, which really is the most fun and comprehensive UX book on the market. It is filled with pictures, case studies, interviews, and it is printed in color. Also, if you get attacked in the night you can also use it as a defensive sheild. I’m not even kidding, the book is like a 700+ pages. Bullets couldn’t get through that.
If you are teaching a UX class the book comes with an arsenal of teaching materials for each chapter. Here is a picture of the slides I just opened. The website is filled with really useful materials that you can use without having to build your own — something that I think is a definite win. But it is also a good set of materials if you are running your own book club on the different sections of the book.
Last, I couldn’t neglect that one of the reasons I secretly love this book is that it is written by three of the most amazing women in Human-Computer Interaction. I remember when I first started learning about HCI and UX. It was filled with discussions about the Gang of Four, Norman duking it out with AI people in the 70s and 80s, Rex Hartson writing and winning the first HCI proposal, and Tom Moran kicking butt out at Euro PARC. It was filled with luminaries that all just happened to be men. Amazing men, but men none the less.
Being the only woman in most of my graduate HCI courses and definitely one of the only women in my undergrad computer science courses, this was the first real time I’d seen bad ass women in the field. And the book was amazing to boot. It introduced me to a whole battery of other amazing women, who were introduced through interviews, like Abigail Sellen. The picture on the left is from the Interaction Design website that has a bunch of extra materials, including the interviews from the book for anyone to read. I poured over these interviews and really started to feel less alone in the field.
I’m not saying that you should buy or read this book because it was written by women and features the work of some amazing women. But I am saying that if you have to pick a comprehensive UX methods and UX history book, and you like supporting women in a male dominated field, that this would be the book for you (as it was and is for me).
Book Club Questions
- We’ve had a few book suggested a definitive UX manuals. For instance, Aubrey just suggested Measuring User Experience and Lauren has suggested Lean UX. What is your go to UX manual? Why?
- How do you pick between qualitative and quantitative methods? Even in our own blog we’ve had a short discussion about qualitative methods from Shahtab. Do you ever have the luxury of choosing the ‘right’ method?
- Who is your favorite bad ass HCI / UX woman you’d like to shout out to?
