Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services
A great resource for reading about the full breadth of what it means to be involved on a UX team, from start to finish. It can be read straight through but may work best as a reference guide when you need some process inspiration, or you’re not sure of the next best course of action. I take this book as somewhat autobiographical, since Goodwin references much of her work with Cooper, and there’s plenty of material (some may say an overwhelming amount) to get yourself acquainted with modern, effective research and design processes, for both the material and digital realms. I don’t recommend this as a first book to read on design as the text assumes some basic knowledge of terminology and the industry.
Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun, and Effective User Experiences
Excellent walkthrough of the psychology behind what’s known as “gamification.” In other words, how to make a good, functioning website or app a delightful, or even meaningful, one–ones that keep users coming back to it or will dings some 9s and 10s on the NPS score. This book deserves two read-throughs to catch some insights you may have missed, especially with all the references to landmark psych studies, but it’s written in plain English, so even a casual reader will get a lot out of it.
The Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life
This is an odd, non-technical UX design book. It reads more like a personal philosophical treatise than, say, an explanation of the modern design process. But that fact shouldn’t deter you. Maeda offers 10 short, understandable rules for design simplicity, and the book is short enough that you risk very little time commitment in diving in if you’re not sure. There are times when Maeda’s prose is noticeably ESL (though I don’t know if English actually is his second language), but the angular phrasing is more endearing than confusing. Filled with personal anecdotes and good bit of user-centric psychology, The Laws of Simplicity is an effective curveball in your design reading arsenal.
A Project Guide to UX Design: For User Experience Designers in the Field or in the Making
A excellent primer on designing for, and the design process of, digital environments. I’d recommend this over Designing for the Digital Age for design newcomers who know they are going to be entering into a digital-specific design role. It’s not quite an exhaustive book, and some of us who have experience in very specific design fields, or have very specific design role, may find some of the information and advice unusable or irrelevant. A great introduction for newbies.
Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks
Excellent handbook for getting started on proper UX design for the dreaded online form. The good thing here is that Wrobleski points out which rules are hard-and-fast and which ones are variable, citing other experts and viewpoint in the field where appropriate. Some modern solutions that address form usability, like the float label pattern, are not covered here because of the book’s vintage, but the expounded principals are still sound and endure as long as web forms are still in play.
White Fang
This book was a nice surprise. Perhaps because of the cinematic cheese surrounding animal-centric stories, consuming the written version felt like crossing a line into saccharine love stories with furry quadruped versions of native American tribes. I don’t entertain notions that animals (at least the cute or furry ones) are noble savages; they certainly aren’t automata, especially the more biologically complex ones like wolves, but they don’t have the same wetware that can process phenomena that humans do.
London offers us a “slice of life” through the titular protag’s birth and into his adult years, though I use that genre designation loosely. In reality, the story is more of a bildungsroman of a major player in the (in many senses of the phrase) “red in tooth and claw” of Tennyson’s natural world. White Fang is very much a product of his environment and “training,” leaving only a smidge of his headspace for the some frontal lobe-like decisions–but only as a matter of survival. White Fang lives only to hunt; he’s not doing calculus. Like nature itself, the story is neither tragic nor comic, but a mix of both.