These cycles make it easier to assess and ensure your designs align with the users’ or business’s needs. The Design of Everyday Things walks readers through the special relationship between designers and users. It also shows you how the design of simple devices can leave users questioning their intelligence. Think the “Norman door” that leaves people feeling dumb after pulling a push door or vice versa. In an industry as dynamic as UX design, isolating yourself is one of the easiest ways to render your skill set obsolete.
After reading this one, you will know more about effective emotional designing and its principle, than you do today. Talks about the overwhelming world of choices a customer is exposed to and how, as a UX designer, you can take this into account while designing new experiences for your customers. Books may have lost their readership, but they have not left their value and the companionship. If you are an avid reader, you can resonate with the fact that there is nothing better than reading those next five pages of the book before going to bed. Well-reading not only helps form new ideas and live in a magical world but if you have the right book in your hands, you can also learn new ideas and become better at what you do.
“Don’t make me think” by Steve Krug
To some extent, being so dated makes the examples easier to understand, and many of the same principles still apply today. Its unique strength is showing side by side examples of good interface design versus bad interface design. The book can help you reconsider your approach to user research and has insights on how to have better conversations. Some of the ideas in the book are also valuable to keep in mind when designing products. You might be an entrepreneur looking to create products that will resonate with the users, a marketer trying to understand the users better. Whether you’re thinking about starting a career in UX design, or are already in one, good UX books are essential resources for becoming an invaluable UX designer.
There are some principles and tactics that could help you go around and present your concepts. Read if you want to dig deeper and find out how to build the basis of the product, that part of the iceberg that is below the visual interface. Though no single book can contain all the essential info in 400 pages, this one covers well a big chunk of UX knowledge.
Universal Principles of Design
The Design of Everyday Things was first published in 1988, and it’s known as the usability bible. Bestfolios is a gallery featuring the best portfolios and resumes from top UI/UX designers, graphic designers and motion designers. Gothelf shares some real-life case studies about how firms in different industries have implemented the tactics shared in the book. A typical mistake I ui ux books see in UX portfolios is lack of content explaining their contribution to the effort, the images are only the final product and not the process to get there. “The Elements of User Experience” also covers the general terminology of UX design and the relationship between different terms. And, if you’re looking to expand your horizon, check out the footnotes for further readings.
That’s a four-step process embedded into the products of many successful companies to encourage customer behavior in a very subtle manner. The book is for those people who understand that design is not just about arranging visual elements in the most aesthetic image, but more about how humans interact with a design object. It tells us the rules that shape human perception, and that is exactly what every designer needs to understand.
Those little designers have grown up into big professionals and today they reached their old textbooks from top shelves for you. They blow the dust off and figure out that even if the books are outdated sometimes when it comes to the visual component, the principal component is now more relevant than ever before. Inspired is the perfect book to shed light on how everything works. Ilya, our CEO at Eleken design agency, strongly recommends reading this book to all of us (especially the marketing department). Now while you’re struggling to unsee the picture above, it’s high time to introduce the book curation principle I’ve used for this article to recommend you best UI/UX design books.
- The book is easy to read and provides plenty of real-world examples and case studies that will help you to understand the concepts covered.
- The best part is that you will make sense to every type of designer irrespective of their level and understanding of the subject.
- Dix is passionate about designing things that connect humans and computers—everything from machines to software.