Top 15 Books on UX, Product Design and UX Psychology Task You Should Have
Below you will find the selection of the books on design, Product Design, UI, UX Psychology Task and professional career that we consider as the best ones in the market today.
1. Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
A classic of all time that never goes out of style, Do not make me think is the ABC of usability, although it has updated severally since its first edition, its contents are always valid.
In 2005, a second version was released with some upgrades. You can get it in many languages. It is very, very easy to read.
2. The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide by Leah Buley
If you are working in a company that does not have much focus on UX design, this is the book that will help you to value the importance of the user experience. The User Experience team of one is a brief summary of the UX philosophy and shows the best techniques and practical tools to improve the UX of any project. Through real cases, the book shows us planning, research, design, testing, and validation methods. This book is really one of the top books on UX\Product Design\UX Psychology Task.
Buley gives us, practically, the keys for our company to bet on implementing UX processes, although currently, its benefits are quite widespread in the corporate culture.
3. 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People by Susan Weinschenk
We design to get answers from people. We want people to purchase something, learn more or take action of any kind. Designing without understanding what makes people act as they do is like exploring a new city without a map: the results will be confusing, confusing and inefficient. This book blends real science and research with realistic models to offer a guide that all designers need. With it, you can design more intuitive and attractive jobs for printing, websites, applications and products that match the way people think, work and play. Then you can perfect your user experience.
4. The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
This is what we call a pound, for two reasons, for the content of its pages and because it is literally a long or long book.
In this book, Norman tells in a humorous way the misadventures due to design errors of some products that we use every day. From this book comes the famous and beloved concept of “affordance” that we use so much when we design interfaces.
One of the reasons why people love this book is because it talks about the objects of the physical world, not so much about digital interfaces, making it very clear that UX is everything around us in our environment.
5. Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden
If you have heard about agile software development methodologies, this book will be easy to understand and very familiar with. Read UX, talk about the techniques that you must put in place so that your work team has a better collaboration, as well as becoming faster when developing and designing a product.
6. Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love by Jon Kolko
This is a great book in UX design. Design thinking is relevant in all circumstances, but even more so in complex environments that require a lot of thought. People resist change, because change is scary and because it is risky. When things do not work too badly, it’s hard to imagine doing otherwise. Bringing design thinking into an organization requires patience. It is necessary to obtain both the mandate of the management and the acceptance of the base.
The products of an organization are directly influenced by the shape of the organization. If an organization is poorly organized, poorly managed, and / or inefficient, it is likely that the products and services will be unsatisfactory. This book will take you all the way.
7. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini, George Newbern
In this new book, the fruit of 20 years of research and social and psychological experiments, Dr. Robert Cialdini delivers his revolutionary method to influence and convince a person or an audience. Revolutionary, because it holds in a keyword, neologism which perfectly summarizes its principle: Pre-Suasion, or how the art of persuasion must begin well before the first word has been pronounced to be truly effective.
8. The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar
Every day we make choices. Orange button or green button? Save or spend? Stay or leave?
In terms of web strategy, we decide what is best to achieve our objectives according to our empirical experience, according to best practices or the temptation of experimentation. We invite more or less awkwardly our visitors to make a choice, click here, see this, buy, register and share. But what are the underlying mechanics of choice, do we really benefit? Sheena Iyengar explained it in this book.
9. The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us by DANIEL SIMONS
If a gorilla suddenly jumped onto a basketball court, you would realize, right? The invisible gorilla is an exciting, entertaining, rigorous and very funny inquiry into the incredible but everyday tricks that your brain regularly deceives you. The authors of this book asked a group of volunteers to contemplate a one-minute movie in which some boys played basketball and counted the passes. At a certain moment, a person] dressed as a gorilla appeared on the screen, who pounded his chest with his fists and left. Surprisingly almost half of the volunteers did not notice the gorilla. For them, for their brains, it was invisible.
This fascinating book is about this and many more things related to cognition, perception, illusions and our brain. And answer questions like these: why can an honest witness end up accusing an innocent of a crime? Why can an expert executive lose millions of euros in a second? Why can Homer Simpson teach you many things about how to think clearly?
10. Psychology for Designers by Joe Leech
Psychology for designers is a booklet by Joe Leech about, oh, surprise, the place where psychology and design meet (two of my greatest passions). However, in this book, you find a framework of psychological knowledge applied to design. Psychology can make your designs better by providing a design problem with a discrete solution.
11. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
Charles Duhigg is a New York Times reporter, this book was published in February 2012 by Random House. This book opens the mind and exposes it to the science behind habit creation and reformation. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business was in the bestseller list of Amazon.com, New York Times, and USA Today.
12. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely, Simon Jones, et al.
Why do clever people make fallacious choices every day? The responses will shock you.
Predictably Irrational is an interesting, witty and wholly unique glimpse at why we all make illogical choices. Why can a 70p aspirin do something a 7p aspirin can’t? If something is free, it must involve a deal, right? Why is everything interlinked, even if it shouldn’t be? How do our expectations affect our actual evaluations and decisions?
In this book, Dan Ariely, behavioral economist hits on the heart of our strange behavior, showing how irrationality often replaces rational logic and that the reason for this is implanted in our minds.
13. Design for the Mind by Victor Yocco
This book guides people to understand how applications and websites can profit from an awareness of our intrinsic, natural responses as humans, and to apply the very principles to our own designs. This congenial book presents the psychological principles, brakes each into simply digestible concepts, and then reveals how we can apply them. The approach is to deepen your knowledge of why people act in the ways they do. After reading the book, you’ll be ready to make your product more psychologically favorable, persuasive and engaging.
14. The Paradox Of Choice: Why More Is Less, Creative Confidence, Rework by Barry Schwartz
The paradox of choice: A book written by Barry Schwartz in 2004, which talks about freedom of choice, and its effect on modern society, proposing that choosing has not made us happier but more dissatisfied The “official dogma” of modern societies is that if we want to maximize well-being, we must maximize individual freedom, and for this we must maximize the choice of choices, since more possibilities, more freedom, and therefore more well-being. In a medium-sized supermarket, there can be dozens of varieties of cookies, jams, drinks, and all kinds of products. The same in an appliance business, dozens of devices that do many things that we do not even know, or with cell phones, where it is not possible to buy one do not do too many things more than we need.
15. Designing Products People Love: How Great Designers Create Successful Products by Scott Hurff
This book will take you through how you can create that will successfully attract customers. With this down-to-earth book, you will learn from the few best product designers in the field, from companies like Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Facebook. You are going to understand how to identify and interpret customer pain, and also master how to use this analysis to lead your team through every step of product making.
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