If you can turn reading and improving your skills into a daily habit, the compounding effect over just a few years will put you decades ahead. The simple step you’ve taken to research this list puts you ahead of 95% of designers in your position. Laying the Foundations is essentially a handbook on design systems. It’s a great book that is easy to read and follow and offers great advice and practical tips for UI designers and design teams on creating design systems and digital brand guidelines.

These exercises prompt critical thinking and remind readers that UX approaches should be adaptable and tailored to individual projects. It’s an informative read that encourages questioning and flexibility in UX design. The book imparts essential perceptual and cognitive ui ux design books psychology insights to UI designers. It enables them to understand and intuitively apply design rules rather than blindly follow them. The book helps designers make informed decisions, even in challenging situations like trade-offs, time limits, or resource constraints.

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Knapp’s goal with this book is to help you design and build better products faster. Laying the Foundations by Andrew Couldwell is a comprehensive guide to creating, documenting, and maintaining design systems. Originally published in 2019, Andrew covers practical guides on the entire design process and how to design websites and products systematically.

100 UI/UX Tips & Tricks is short and to the point, with illustrative examples that act as mini case studies, as well as more than 60 additional external sources. Modern web and product design continues to become more complex every year. Design Systems is all about treating your creative process methodically and assuring that you and your team will get all of the advantages of using a design system.

Essential UI Design Books

But no worries, I’ll be right here to lead you to the best of the best, whether it is a classic book for beginners or a book on new UX trends for advanced UX designers. Whether you are a UX writer, UX designer, copywriter, product manager, even straight-up the CEO of a business; this book has a lot to offer in terms of practice and inspiration. Whether you are a UX writer, a UX designer working on UX writing, or the poor developer above, here are great books on UX writing to get your writing top-notch.

Some people think Kadavy’s statement is exaggerated as he barely directs users to certain points and his pages-long content doesn’t come together like a perfect puzzle. At the same time, it is a real commitment if you actually want to learn something, and picking up any book is out of the question. Get weekly updates on the newest design stories, case studies and tips right in your mailbox. Learn to determine this phase in time and use its opportunities to prolong the life of your product. If you’re tired of feeling stretched too thin and want to make a real impact, Essentialism is your answer.

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

Even to non-design oriented folks, bad typography is easy to spot, reflects badly on the brand and leads to a poor user experience. Knowing how to craft a compelling message and integrating that message into your product design and marketing is easier than you may think. Building a StoryBrand is efficiently packed with useful information and frameworks to help you create a story that will capture customer attention. An incredibly useful skill for a UX designer, copywriter, marketer or entrepreneur. More than just a self-help book to overcome procrastination, The War of Art is a call-to-arms on professionalism, artistic integrity and drive, whatever your field may be.

• Explained by a computer science professor with degrees from Yale and Stanford and years of experience as a designer, Jeff Johnson.
• The book’s main idea is to keep in touch with your customer by building a regular interviewing practice.
• Writing is Designing is not necessarily an intro to UX writing book, but it is quite easy to read.
• If your interest in UX design goes deeper than being an endeavor in getting a new business perspective or learning about a new field that might benefit you in your own field, these are the books you’re looking for.
• The reality is that most designers don’t read books and don’t actively strive to improve their design skills systematically.

It could be optimizing your design thinking or design process, or simply because Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think made you think. Learning to understand people, designers get tremendous power to create interfaces that are not just easy to use but encourage you to do things that you didn’t mean to. I am not pointing fingers, but you just look at those addictive social media interfaces or video platforms that automatically play the next video in a sequence. I reached out to product designers I know personally (kudos to the Eleken tribe), and also product designers I don’t know personally (kudos to you, redditors).

Optimizing Web Design Workflow: Essential Tools and Techniques

And, if you’re looking to expand your horizon, check out the footnotes for further readings. My favorite chapters are the one about hierarchy (“Hierarchy is Everything,” indeed) and the one about Designing Text. Kinneret Yifrah explains all UX writing a.k.a. microcopy principles in all its dimensions; from voice, tone, conversational copy, to CTAs and error messages. Now if you were looking for the UX writing 101 book, this is the one. Whether it is lean startups, lean UX, or any other agile project, they’re here to stay. There is nothing much like A Project Guide to UX Design out on the market that gained such popularity.

The “Interviewing Users” also gives great insider tips, like making a brain dump before interviews to clear your mind of preconceptions and expectations. Portigal breaks down the process into well-structured, detailed chapters full of examples and helpful tips, like how to deal with difficult interviewees or slow conversations. I was recommended this book while looking for something comprehensive to prepare for my first interviews.

The Design of Everyday Things

Even though this design book was originally published in 2003 (a lifetime ago in the technology space), most of the principles and concepts applied in practice contained in this book are still relevant today. Heaths’ framework will help you as a designer to focus on the highest-impact ideas and to better communicate with your target audience. Even the best designers are just “hacking” it most of the time and learning new skills as they go. It’s OK to feel overwhelmed by the number of things every designer needs to learn.

Aside from the fact that it has precious knowledge for any new UX designer, what makes Don’t Make Me Think even better is that it is a usability manual that is supposed to be serious and boring, but isn’t. Hooked by Nir Eyal is a book about how to create addictive products. Co-founder of Mule Design Studios, Erika Hall, shares her wealth of knowledge in “Just Enough Research.” It aims to improve questioning and critical thinking in research. Hall covers a wide range of topics and offers useful methods for better and faster research.

Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design by Jenifer Tidwell

It’s for anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers today. Universal Principles of Design is an in-depth encyclopedia of design, user psychology and mental models. It’s so broad that it’s applicable across any discipline, making it a fantastic resource to broaden your design knowledge and understanding with just one book. After Steve Jobs left Apple, the world wondered how the company would continue to make great products. Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda is the rare remarkable insider’s story that reveals how Jobs and the design team utilised a Darwinian approach to ideation and creativity.