5 Great Design Books for Your UX Library

Starting a UX library in your studio? Here’s a list of some of my favorite UX books and a few key takeaways. Enjoy!

A Project Guide to UX Design

By Carolyn Chandler, Russ Unger

There are a ton of well-reviewed books and readers for the general UX practitioner available. However, this one still stands out on my shelf as a great primer to get your head around UX for most projects. The project guide illustrates how UX Design connects multiple design disciplines including business strategy, research, interaction design, and engineering.

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Now, Discover Your Strengths

By Marcus Buckingham, Donald O. Clifton

I first learned of this book listening to a video blog from UX designer, Sarah Doody. The book is a well researched albeit prescriptive method devised to make you aware of your innate professional talents and intuitions and learn how to best harness them in the workplace. Arguably, It's most sustainable to build your career around your natural superpowers and curiosities above pure ambition and will. Check out this book and accompanying assessment (worth it) and you might be enlightened.

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Lean UX

By Jeff Gothelf

An extension to the canonical book, The Lean Startup, Lean UX provides an ultra-concise, principled overview of UX Design’s role in agile projects. It also provides thoughtful, sustainable action steps for integrating the lean approach to organizations of various shapes and sizes.

Few of my favorite takeaways:

• Progress = outcomes, not output.

• Create the first version of the thing rather than spending half the day debating its merits in a conference room.

• Emphasize learning first and scaling second.

• Figure out what you’re trying to learn, and the fastest way you can learn it.

• Created a shared understanding of design problems and solutions.

• Collaborate: creating together increases the design IQ of the entire team.

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Everybody Writes

By Ann Handley

The more screens I design, the more I appreciate the value of written communication as a digital designer’s skillset. Understanding the people who use the product your designing should include comprehending how to communicate with them naturally, contextually and with relevance to their needs through the business lens. This book will help you write with intention and consistency for the web and in business communication in general. I picked up this book up on a whim and am so glad I did. 

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Universal Methods of Design

By Bella Martin, Bruce M. Hanington

100 design techniques to try when approaching a design challenge. Concise summary of each method and good perspective on usage.

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Conclusion

Tangible books may be a slowly dying technology as digital formats take over. Thankfully, all of these titles are available in digital format. Either way you prefer to read, I suggest taking notes in the margins of books or on sticky notes. And once you’ve completed any great book, try synthesizing your notes to help a friend or colleague understand a few of the most valuable highlights. Educating someone else is a great way to retain newly gathered information.

Happy Reading!

UX Design and Ego

It's important to remember the best design wisdom may come from anyone on your project team. And the best way to empathize with the users you design for is to understand where your ego starts and stops as a designer and thinker. It's easy to make biased design decisions based on your own, albeit compelling perspectives that may not be relevant. 

Good discussion of ego and professionalism on the Love Your Work podcast.

"The strength of our ego boundaries is the result of each properly resolved developmental crisis." 

- John Bradshaw

"Innovation is the state once drama is gone."

- Cy Wakeman

Design and the Gig Economy

Creating this post as a reminder that what we design solves business and customer problems–but it can also negatively impact real lives. This is especially apparent in exciting startups in the gig economy space. It's important to think deeply about the impact our design innovation and mission might have on humanity.

“As the gig economy grows, so too does the danger that engineers, in attempting to build the most efficient systems, will chop and dice jobs into pieces so dehumanized that our legal system will no longer recognize them.”

Read: “What Have We Done?”: Silicon Valley Engineers Fear They've Created A Monster

What's a User Experience Audit?

A UX audit is an analysis report involving a strategic design inventory exercise and documented list of critical design opportunities to improve a product's user experience. These 8 factors are important to consider. You can use tools such as Capian, Invision, or Google Docs to create and present annotated screenshots to support your reader's comprehension of the audit. Tip: Checkout PageMarker (Chrome Extension) for any easy way to circle, cross out and draw arrows quickly over the browser window before taking your screenshot.

1. Quantitative Data

• What features or content might be a problem today according to analytics?

2. Qualitative Data

• What heuristic or user-validated insights gan you gather to assess the current state of design?

3. Accessibility

• Find out what WCAG standards does the client or organization need to abide by?

4. Interactive Pain Points

• What touchpoints are broken, confusing, difficult, etc.?

5. Information Architecture

• Analyze your products' content to recommend action steps toward better ways to organize, surface, and tag all the information that's supports user journey and business goals.

6. Branding Violations

• Assess the organization's brand style guide to call out any ways in which the product breaks brand rules.

7. Performance

• Run performance testing tools to identify steps to improve site speed and extended use.

8. Recommendations

• Write actionable steps to resolve (or further investigate) those important product issues and opportunities you identified in the steps above.

4 Qualities of a Good Architect

Visionary architect Gae Aulenti finds these 4 traits most critical to a great architect. IMO, this is just as applicable to the design profession.

1. Analytic talent

Know how to study and recognize every different kind of architecture, to create unique, specific solutions with respect to their context, their foundation place.

2. Synthetic talent

Know how to make the necessary synthesis to give priority to the major architectural principles, to disregard what is arbitrary in a project.

3. Prophetic capacity

Embrace the art, poetry, and aspiration for invention for your project.

4. Awareness

Surface and understand Biases.