5 Must Read Books for UX'ers

I now keep a spreadsheet of the books I've read over the last few years with simple reminders of what I learned from them. I keep it for two reasons: 1. I sometimes forget that I've already purchased a book and this keeps me from buying it twice :) and 2. because I loan them out so often that I often lose track of who has my books. In fact, some of the books below are no longer on my shelf because I loaned them prior to starting the list. I've found three main themes in my reading list - general business books, psychology/leadership books and UX/Innovation books. I thought I'd share my top 5 UX books that I feel would give anyone related to developing customer centric solutions a leg up on the process.

1. Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability- Steve Krug
Hard to believe this book has been around for 15 years now. Even for well-practiced designers this book is a great reminder to keep things simple. Krug jammed this book full of commonsense approaches and usability tips to improve any website or app. This is a great resource for other disciplines that work closely with UX or product development teams as well.

2. Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience- Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden
If you’ve read The Lean Start-up by Eric Reis you can probably skip this more UX centric version. But if you haven’t read any of the Lean series and work closely on UX this book is a must. It helps designers rethink how they might go about answering the value question at hand. Let me be clear though- I don’t believe in Minimal Viable Product, a core tenet of the Lean series. Replace it with Minimal Valuable Product and now we’re in business. It's a small but important distinction that will help UX teams avoid hours of debate about what is shippable. I’ve used some of the tips from this book to help determine the value of features, prior to engineering, to validate that they solve a meaningful problem. As the book promises, it will help you deliver smarter solutions faster. As a follow-up read Lean Analytics by Kroll and Yoskovitz is an excellent primer on how to use data more effectively throughout the design process by understanding how to leverage key KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) to make sure you're on the right track.

3. 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about People- Susan Weinschenk
You can read any of Susan’s books and you’ll be a more thoughtful designer for it but I chose 100 Things because it has such clearly usable tips that are based on dozens, if not hundreds of research papers and experiments to validate their use. She covers issues like memorability, focus, readability, and motivation. Whether you are trying to get someone to buy something, or just engage with your content, you will find tips to apply immediately to your experience. If you ever wanted to have someone do a research lit review on human behavior and encapsulate them into easy to apply nuggets, than this book is your answer.

4. The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman
This book has been around forever and is basically required reading for anyone in the design industry. Norman, one of the early pioneers of design thinking, helps us understand how to apply models, affordances, and constraints to our problem sets to craft more meaningful and relevant solutions. Regardless of if you are working on a website, a business or a product, you'll find something that will apply to your project. For extra credit pick up Emotional Design, another Norman staple. Great fundamentals of design principles with accompanying examples.

5. Think Better: An Innovators Guide to Productive Thinking- Tim Hurson
I first read this book while UX Director at OfficeLabs, an incubation group at Microsoft. It made me completely rethink what brainstorming meant. It introduced me to the idea of reproductive thinking (which is what most of us participate in during our traditional “brainstorming sessions”) and productive thinking. It covers 1/3, 2/3 and 3/3 brainstorming depths (I won’t ruin the surprise) and how to use lateral thinking and catalysts to push your thinking into new territory. If you ever lead brainstorming sessions do yourself a favor and get this book. It will changed the way you work and approach deep problem solving.

Now there are easily another dozen books I could have added to this list. Tim Brown’s, Change by Design, The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley, Scenario Focused Engineering by Austina De Bonte and Drew Fletcher – each with great learnings about deep design thinking, putting the right team together and the process of design in a software organization with multi-disciplined stakeholders. Add Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton, an early pioneer of the HCI field, for a practical road map on the iterative product development process and the artifacts necessary to drive it forward.

I’d love to see what books have influenced you. Don’t hesitate to add a good one to the reading list.