Must read books for those aspiring to be UX designers
By: Aviram Vijh
Tags: Hows, UX, Books, Design, Aviram

Must read books for those aspiring to be UX designers

(and for those moving up the ladder)

Where do I start?

So you want to be a UX designer. And have decided that you are willing to invest energy in learning the skills and acquiring the knowledge required to become one. Where do you start? I’d say with books. In this article, I recommend five books that aspiring UX designers must read and internalise, and five more for those who are already UX designers and want to move up their career ladders.

The first five

Dr. Donald Norman’s seminal work and my favourite book on the list. In fact, I think this is a book everyone should read, and should be included in college syllabi. The updated version (2013) provides relevant examples that are needed to communicate with today’s audience. Don Norman wrote the book for many reasons. The initial thought was the frustration that he encountered with ‘everyday things’. His inability to operate simple things was frustrating, and after feeling flustered and confused at his inability to operate things, he realized that much of the problem was due to poorly designed interface. This made him realize that people shouldn’t feel guilty or stupid for their inability to operate devices. The fault was with the unintuitive interface — that shifts the problem space to the design of a good interface. It taught me how to think about design problems. In fact, it taught me how to look at a problem critically, and once you learn to do so, you realize that most problems in the world that pertain to product and services are design problems at one level or the other. It’s worth summarizing the main contents of the book.

Chapter 1 talks about the idea that users shouldn’t need an engineering degree to know to use a product. Don introduces key principles such as visibility, mappings, affordances, signifiers, constraints, conceptual models and feedback. Plenty of fun stuff in there. Chapter 2 talks about psychology behind design what really goes on in a user’s head when they try and do/use something. Chapter 3 is about what Don calls ‘knowledge in the head’ and the ‘knowledge in the world’, which explains how people remember stuff and how design can aid people doing things in a particular manner (to prevent mistakes or frustrations). Chapter 4 is about constraints, which tells you exactly what sort of constraints help prevent errors. It talks about physical, semantic, cultural and logical constraints. Chapter 5 deals with the idea that ‘to err is human’ and therefore a good designer must think about the sort of errors/problems that a user is likely to make while using a product and how to mitigate the frustration arising out of making these errors. Chapter 6 is one of my favorites as it talks about the constant battle between aesthetics and usability. From general truths about the world and people, Chapter 7 dives into the user-centered design process and explains how you can make great products by following a certain way of working. Start with this book when beginning your journey into anything related to UX.

Steve Krugg’s witty book with a wittier title. We live in a world that has changed so dramatically that users are often playing catch up. Every new product works differently. Every new app uses different interaction standards. Every second website tries to define a new information architecture for how things should be organized. Users have unconsciously decided to start rejecting products and services that require them to learn something new, or simply but, that require them to think too much. Designers must understand and empathize with users, because in one single day 1000 + apps alone are added to the App Store and a similar number to the Playstore.

A simple search for a screen recorder in the App Store (something that I recently did) gave me some 300 results. Most of these do the same thing. How do I know which one to download? The first one? The free one? The highest rated one (only 20 of them had ratings, does that mean the rest are bad or simply untried?)? The smallest (lightest) one? There are just too many variables. Users in today’s world expect things to ‘just work’ or to ‘just get it’, and unless your product a path-breaking one with zero competition, be smart or be deleted (or worse ignored). The book contains numerous examples that illustrate several fundamental principles to keep in mind when designing anything; products, websites, apps, or services. Other notable topics include the fact that users don’t read stuff anymore, they merely scan, how to design home pages, how usability arguments are often a waste of time, and how to conduct cheap usability testing.

Another seminal work in the field of UX. Different from Don Norman’s work in that this is more specific for UX designers and starts to introduce UXers to how to go about planning and executing UX work effectively. I’ve deliberately introduced this book after the first two because I recommend reading the other two before this to build empathy for the field, the people involved and the challenges. Jesse James Garrett, is a UX stalwart who authored this book in 2002 and then published the current edition in 2010. He worked for one of the most renowned UX consultancies called Adaptive Path.

Coming to the book, it smartly breaks down the entire UX lifecycle into five phases or skeletons: Surface, Skeleton, Structure, Scope and Strategy. Let’s look at an example, from the book, to better understand these planes. Most people, at one time or another, have purchased a book over the Web. The experience is pretty much the same every time — you go to the site, you find the book you want (maybe by using a search engine or maybe by browsing a catalog), you give the site your credit card number and your address, and the site confirms that the book will be shipped to you. That neat, tidy experience actually results from a whole set of decisions — some small, some large — about how the site looks, how it behaves, and what it allows you to do. These decisions build upon each other, informing and influencing all aspects of the user experience. If we peel away the layers of that experience, we can begin to understand how those decisions are made.The Surface Plane On the surface you see a series of Web pages, made up of images and text. Some of these images are things you can click on, performing some sort of function such as taking you to a shopping cart. Some of these images are just illustrations, such as a photograph of a book cover or the logo of the site itself. The Skeleton Plane Beneath that surface is the skeleton of the site: the placement of buttons, tabs, photos, and blocks of text. The skeleton is designed to optimize the arrangement of these elements for maximum effect and efficiency — so that you remember the logo and can find that shopping cart button when you need it. The Structure Plane The skeleton is a concrete expression of the more abstract structure of the site. The skeleton might define the placement of the interface elements on our checkout page; the structure would define how users got to that page and where they could go when they were finished there. The skeleton might define the arrangement of navigational items allowing the users to browse categories of books; the structure would define what those categories actually were. The Scope Plane The structure defines the way in which the various features and functions of the site fit together. Just what those features and functions are constitutes the scope of the site. Some sites that sell books offer a feature that enables users to save previously used addresses so they can be used again. The question of whether that feature — or any feature — is included on a site is a question of scope. The Strategy Plane The scope is fundamentally determined by the strategy of the site. This strategy incorporates not only what the people running the site want to get out of it but what the users want to get out of the site as well. In the case of our bookstore example, some of the strategic objectives are pretty obvious: Users want to buy books, and we want to sell them. Other objectives might not be so easy to articulate.

This interdisciplinary book, which is also available as a pocket book, is a must for designers. In little more than 200 pages, Universal Principles of Design explains a wide variety of foundational design concepts, including performance load, Occam’s Razor, and the product adoption life-cycle. Superbly illustrated and thoroughly explained, this text provides a detailed summary of over 100 mental models that relate to the design process. Each principle is explained in two pages, complete with visual examples and references to other texts for further study.

In little more than 200 pages, Universal Principles of Design explains a wide variety of foundational design concepts, including performance load, Occam’s Razor, and the product adoption life-cycle. Superbly illustrated and thoroughly explained, this text provides a detailed summary of over 100 mental models that relate to the design process. Each principle is explained in two pages, complete with visual examples and references to other texts for further study. It is obviously hard to remember all these principles, so I recommend reading the book, taking note of the most relevant principles depending on what you are likely to work on, and then using it as a reference for future projects.

The first book is your step forward, in terms of being highly involved and diving into the details of how to gather data and build products in a user-centered manner. It s a slightly older book and therefore not entirely up to date with examples from 2017, but it is superbly researched and presented, and remains relevant in 2017. It touches the key aspect of ‘context’, which is something you’ll hear often in the world of UX. In fact, in UX, context is every thing. To put it simply, not only do you need to understand what users want (in terms of a product or service) but also how they will use that product or service. Will they use their app while in a hurry (think Maps)? Will they use your product in case of an emergency (think fire extinguishers)? Will they use your service during an emotionally charged period (think insurance)? As a designer, you have to learn to understand and take into account these contexts of use, without which, the best product might totally fail.

For example, in 2006, the American telecom giant Verizon introduced a mobile ESPN service + phone, with the idea that sports lovers will pay a premium to have access to their favorite sports on the go. It failed miserably. Was it a bad product? Probably not, but it failed because it did not recognize that watching sports is a social, enthralling activity, which people want to do with friends and family. Think how many people go to banks today vs. how many who do almost everything online? The number of the former has been growing exponentially. But how many people, who previously watched sports in stadiums, watch sports mostly at home given that there is better technology to enjoy them at home? Not many. The stadium occupancy rates for sporting events are similar, if not better than what they were a decade ago.This, slightly lengthy book, is thorough and exceptionally written. It is your go to guide for learning to to create customer-centric systems. It is specific to designing good UX for technology/systems, and doesn’t cover things such as designing services, although many concepts are cross-applicable in reality.