10 Must Read UX Design Books
Every year, with my team we teach Service Design and User Experience to newly graduates, and the most common question at the end of the course is: “Do you have any book recommendation for aspiring User Experience Designers?”
There are a lot of great books on UX and Usability these days. So many, in fact, that it’s almost impossible to select only a few! However, after a couple of iterations we have defined a list of 10 Must-Reads.
1. DON’T MAKE ME THINK BY STEVE KRUG
Five years and more than 100,000 copies after it was first published, it’s hard to imagine anyone working in Web design who hasn’t read Steve Krug’s “instant classic” on Web usability, but people are still discovering it every day.
In this second edition, Steve adds three new chapters in the same style as the original: wry and entertaining, yet loaded with insights and practical advice for novice and veteran alike.
Don’t be surprised if it completely changes the way you think about Web design. Number one in my list!
2. THE DESIGN OF EVERYDAY THINGS BY DON NORMAN
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.
In this entertaining and insightful analysis, cognitive scientist Don Norman hails excellence of design as the most important key to regaining the competitive edge in influencing consumer behaviour
3. SMASHING UX DESIGN: FOUNDATIONS FOR DESIGNING ONLINE USER EXPERIENCES
The ultimate guide to UX from the world’s most popular resource for web designers and developers
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 (UX).
The authors provide an overview of UX and User Centred Design and examine in detail sixteen of the most common UX design and research tools and techniques for your web projects.
4. SERVICE DESIGN: FROM INSIGHT TO IMPLEMENTATION
Service Design is an eminently practical guide to designing services that work for people.
It offers powerful insights, methods, and case studies to help you design, implement, and measure multichannel service experiences with greater impact for customers, businesses, and society.
5. DESIGNING INTERFACES — PATTERNS FOR EFFECTIVE INTERACTION DESIGN BY JENIFER TIDWELL
UI designers over the years have refined the art of interface design, evolving many best practices and reusable ideas. If you learn these, and understand why the best user interfaces work so well, you too can design engaging and usable interfaces with less guesswork and more confidence.
Designing Interfaces captures those best practices as design patterns — solutions to common design problems, tailored to the situation at hand.
Each pattern contains practical advice that you can put to use immediately, plus a variety of examples illustrated in full color. You’ll get recommendations, design alternatives, and warningson when not to use them.
6. LEAN UX: APPLYING LEAN PRINCIPLES TO IMPROVE USER EXPERIENCE
The Lean UX approach to interaction design is tailor-made for today’s web-driven reality.
In this insightful book, leading advocate Jeff Gothelf teaches you valuable Lean UX principles, tactics, and techniques from the ground up — how to rapidly experiment with design ideas, validate them with real users, and continually adjust your design based on what you learn.
7. SPRINT: HOW TO SOLVE BIG PROBLEMS AND TEST NEW IDEAS IN JUST FIVE DAYS BY JAKE KNAPP
Sprint offers a transformative formula for testing ideas that works whether you’re at a startup or a large organization.
Within five days, you’ll move from idea to prototype to decision, saving you and your team countless hours and countless dollars.
A must read for entrepreneurs and designers of all stripes.
8. 100 THINGS EVERY DESIGNER NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT PEOPLE BY SUSAN WEINSCHENK
We design to elicit responses from people.
We want them to buy something, read more, or take action of some kind. Designing without understanding what makes people act the way they do is like exploring a new city without a map: results will be haphazard, confusing, and inefficient.
This book combines real science and research with practical examples to deliver a guide every designer needs. With it you’ll be able to design more intuitive and engaging work for print, websites, applications, and products that matches the way people think, work, and play.
9. AGILE EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Agile development methodologies may have started life in IT, but their widespread and continuing adoption means there are many practitioners outside of IT — including designers — who need to change their thinking and adapt their practices. This is the missing book about agile that shows how designers, product managers, and development teams can integrate experience design into lean and agile product development.
It equips you with tools, techniques and a framework for designing great experiences using agile methods so you can deliver timely products that are technically feasible, profitable for the business, and desirable from an end-customer perspective
10. CREATIVITY, INC.: OVERCOMING THE UNSEEN FORCES THAT STAND IN THE WAY OF TRUE INSPIRATION
Creativity, Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation — into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about how to build a creative culture — but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, “an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.”
