Books about design
Design books are a blast to read. Here’s a bunch I’ve read through and my thoughts about what I’ve taken away from them.
Designers talking about design
User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant
Fantastic history of design, from the early 1900s to the present day. It’s a great summary of how design has been approached, talked about, thought of, and applied throughout the decades.
Designers who have been in the field for a while probably know the majority of the stories in the book, but even familiar tales include details I haven’t seen in other sources. At times it’s thrilling, tragic, funny, and inspiring.
Probably the biggest thing that stands out in the book is just how long it took to for someone to have the idea to test designs with users. The number of failed alternatives, such as using huge amounts of US military resources to create an “average human”, the Vitruvian Man of design, is just incredible.
Related: The End of Average by Todd Rose also talks about how “average” has evolved and been misunderstood over time, in more detail than this book.
Thoughtless Acts? by Jane Fulton Suri
This book gets mentioned a ton in User Friendly, so I had to buy it just to find out what it is.
The book is a photo collection, with each photo showing people using their tools and environments in ways which they weren’t designed for, but help accomplish the person’s goal.
That might be placing a cup of coffee on top of a car while they shuffle things around in their hands, using an umbrella’s handle as a hook to help carry bags, or using a pencil to hold a hairbun in place.
Really great book that reinforces the importance of learning about the contexts products will be used in, and lots of fun to return to and flip through.
The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
It’s mostly just a quirky little romp wondering why things are designed in frustrating ways, and thinking about what changes would need to happen to make them better.
This is a classic, written in plain language and a pretty fun read.
Design is a Job by Mike Monteiro
Fun book full of dozens upon dozens of great teachings and suggestions. Mike Monteiro in my mind is sort of like the Marc Maron of the design world; just sort of generally angry at everything and in way that’s funny and relatable.
Some of the advice in the book is pretty specific to agency work (in particular the bits about client contracts and contract negotiations), but a lot of it is just great advice for communicating clearly and working effectively with others.
How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer by Debbie Millman
Great interviews with great designers. I don’t think of myself as an artist or graphic designer, so this was a fun book to read because it was a chance to be introduced to all these incredible personalities of the design world that I mostly don’t hear about.
The thing that stuck out to me the most is that when asked how they start a project, every single designer interviewed consistently says some variation of “I start by asking ‘What’s the problem we’re solving?’”.
Sometimes they might add a bit more, like variations of “What information are we communicating?” or “Who are we communicating it to?”, but the thought process around problem-solving is pretty consistent between everyone interviewed in the book. I thought that type of thinking was specific to product design or UX design, so it was really enlightening to see that those are the questions all types of designers are focused on.
One other thing I love to mention is this hilarious line from Massimo Vignelli which closes out the book (full interview can be read here):
Debbie Millman: Is there anything that you haven’t done that you want to do?
Massimo Vignelli: Oversee the redesign of the Vatican. Such a joke! Can you imagine? The Pope as a client! That’d be lovely, turning to the Pope and saying, “Well, the symbol is okay. We can live with that, but everything else has to go.”
Inclusive design
Building for Everyone by Annie Jean-Baptiste
This is a book focused on research, and how research is essential to building inclusive products. The main focus of the book is demystifying challenges about inclusivity, and giving practical approaches to being inclusive — talk to the people you want to include. Share your designs with people from all backgrounds, test how easily they can be learned and used and understood by people outside of your primary user groups.
Go out of your way to make sure that every usability test isn’t conducted with people who have nearly identical backgrounds; it doesn’t take much effort and it pays dividends to do it early and often.
What Can a Body Do? by Sara Hendren
I really like this book a lot. Like the name implies, the book is focused on what people are able to do with their bodies. In particular, people whose bodies are different than most.
It’s a book of stories about people solving problems caused by a disconnect between how people’s bodies work and how environments expect them to work.
Some of the stories in the book are small and scrappy, such as the people working at the Adaptive Design Association (ADA) using cardboard everywhere, for everything, to create strong and sturdy tools personalized for people whose bodies aren’t able to use typical mass-produced versions of a tool.
Other stories are almost unimaginably large, like the Dutch village of Hogeweyk, an entire town built to support people with alzheimers. The town is staffed by nurses and caretakers, and has amenities like shops, movie theaters, and grocery stores. It’s constructed to allow people to live normal lives in spite of difficulties their disease may bring.
The central message of the book is that constraints on what we can and cannot do are not created by our bodies — they are created by our environments.
Communicating design
Design is Storytelling by Ellen Lupton
This is one of my favorite books, and the first book I usually recommend to people. This book is all about reframing the purpose of journey maps, flow charts, storyboards, and other design artifacts as tools to tell a story.
It’s very easy to learn about these types of tools, then start using them because it’s a step in a UX process. The actual purpose of these tools, though, is to communicate information in an interesting and effective way. Usually, the best way to keep your audience’s interest is by telling a story.
I like this book because it doesn’t so much teach many new concepts, methods, or tools. Instead, it takes tools most designers are already familiar with and reframes how they’re meant to be used.
To see a non-design example of how emotional journey maps have been used to explicitly tell a story, check out this presentation from Kurt Vonnegut about the shapes of stories or this related episode from On the Media about modeling the story of the pandemic.
Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
This is such an excellent book. Ever since I learned about charts and graphs back in grade school, I’ve always thought the people who worked with them must be so incredibly smart. Who would think to take information and turn it into a picture? How do people learn to do that? How would someone go about deciding what that picture should look like?
This book is doesn’t just do a great job of explaining how to make those decisions, but also explains how to effectively communicate, especially in slidedeck-based format.
I originally read this book to learn about data visualization, but it ended up becoming one of my favorite books about presentations.
Discussing Design by Adam Connor, Aaron Irizarry
Focused on how to critique designs, the main takeaways from this book are to always keep conversation focused on the original project goal, the problems you’re trying to solve for the user, and how your designs solve those problems.
The book has great info about how to ask for feedback, how to provide feedback, and lots of great advice for facilitating critique sessions so that people are able to be critical without being disrespectful.
Articulating Design Decisions by Tom Greever
While Discussing Design is mostly focused on talking about design with your team, this book is focused about communicating design to your stakeholders. Both books are great reads to help talk about design in clear and effective ways.
Again, the main takeaway is to always keep your audience focused on the problem you’re trying to solve, and the ways which the design might solve them.
This book is full of useful tidbits, such as sharing out designs early so that stakeholders aren’t blindsided by designs, asking for a delay in feedback so that people can provide more than a gut reaction, and learning what different stakeholders care about most so that you can emphasize that information in your communications.
I think that the most helpful bit of information for me was from one of the early chapters, where there’s some examples of good and bad design presentations. A bad presentation does a “real estate tour”, where you start in the top-left of the design and then walk through, from left-to-right, top-to-bottom, every single change you made in the design.
An effective presentation might be something closer to “In the current version, users in evaluative testing were unable to find key information about X, Y, and Z. Because that information is one of the key pieces for most of the tasks on this page, the new version of the design displays that info in big bold letters near the top of the page.”
Using a framings of Old design→ Findings from research→ Changes you made→ Tying those changes back to the problem being solved or the project goal is a great way to keep things focused on the most important pieces of the design, while also explaining the rationale behind the decisions you’re making.
Asking questions and finding answers
Just Enough Research by Erika Hall
This was one of the first books I had recommended to me, and for good reason!
My two biggest takeaways of the book are:
it doesn’t really matter what research method you choose to use, as long as it helps get an answer to the questions you’re asking
if you don’t know what questions you’re trying to ask or why you need to answer them, none of the research methods are going to be very helpful
The book has a ton of information about all the different types of research you can do, and great advice and ideas I haven’t seen repeated anywhere else (such as doing usability tests on competitor’s products — such a smart idea! Nobody talks about this!), and a very delightful criticism of surveys and NPS toward the very end of the book.
It’s a fun book to read, and jam-packed with info!
Start with Why by Simon Sinek
Super big best seller and marketed a lot as a self-help book for finding your personal “why” for doing things.
For designers, I think it’s better to think of this book as a guide to focusing on the problem you’re trying to solve.
It’s really to easy for designers to end up in an environment where you’re being asked to make a layout that fits a requirements doc, and that type of work is never very fun and ends up feeling like you’re producing designs which, even if they look good, will be very ineffective.
Start with Why is about focusing on the problem that’s at the core of any type of project. There’s always some original kernel that was the impetus for everything else, and then after passing through committees, departments, and teams, it ended up being abstracted several layers deep into the requirements doc that ended up on your desk.
This book is a guide about how to get back to that kernel at the core of the problem and continue to stay focused on it, instead of following a requirements doc that may only be tangentially related to the issue that your project is actually trying to solve.
Jobs to Be Done by Anthony W. Ulwick
This is a research-heavy book about finding the tasks that users are trying to accomplish, and then designing thing to facilitate that. It’s a very dense book with a somewhat prescriptive framework, but the concept of finding the “job” your user is trying to do is one of the most common frameworks in design and is incredibly helpful to understand.
Great primer on outcome driven innovation (ODI) and the practice of turning problems into things that are measurable (metrics) in their current state (baseline) and defining what success will look (outcomes, future metrics).
Related: Fidelity is probably the company that applies this with more rigor than anywhere else. Would really recommend listening to this interview with Jen Cardello, head of User Research at Fidelity to learn more about how the most effective teams are structuring and implementing their research practice.
Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden + The User Experience Team of One by Leah Buley
I’m combining these books because they’re both focused on how to work effectively with limited time and budget. That includes starting a project, identifying next steps, effectively communicating with stakeholders to gain support through every step of your process.
Lean UX is a startup focused framework, and The User Experience Team of One is more of a guide to working as a sole researcher/designer, but the concepts, information, and processes both books cover have a ton of overlap and are great to think about together.
Great books for working effectively on teams that don’t have a ton of resources.
Worth noting, I think that The User Experience Team of One leans much more toward doing UX the “right way” than Lean UX.
Lean UX has a couple recommendations, like creating proto-personas, that are definitely hot-button topics which a lot of designers frown upon.
Related: This conference talk from Leah Buley about design maturity and design operations is a fantastic watch https://vimeo.com/121037431
Leading and being led
Inspired by Marty Cagan
I had a mentor tell me this book is pure gold, and I agree wholeheartedly. This is probably the only book that clearly lays out the concepts of departments and their roles/responsibilities, how effective organizations are structured, and how to work effectively inside these common corporate structures.
This book has great information for everyone — independent contributors, managers, and department heads. It basically paints a picture of the platonic ideal of how a modern organization should function, which also helps identify what pieces are missing from any specific organization.
This book has a ton of foundational information about corporate structures, how everything should be working when things are going smoothly, and also gives great advice about inducing change in organizations to make things operate more effectively.
Managing Humans by Michael Lopp
This is written for engineering managers, but most of the advice is applicable in any role. Lots of humorous stories about working with people, handling difficult situations or complicated work styles, setting expectations for others and handling conflicts between teammates, and full of good advice to prepare for similar situations.
The author used to run a blog back about engineering management back when blogs were a thing people ran, and this book basically consolidates all the advice from those posts into something that’s easy to digest over a weekend.
This is a fun read and full of great advice.
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
This is a book I’ve been recommended a million times, and always rolled my eyes at the recommendation because it’s a self-help book.
It’s actually a great book for designers! Especially anyone who does interviews! I finally decided to read it because I heard Erika Hall mention it two or three times as one of her favorite design books.
It’s a medium-sized book and worth reading, but honestly the answer to the title’s “how” is really just “listen”. Listening, nodding along, asking questions, and being sincere in your interest is this book’s big secret to connecting to people, getting them to open up about what they’re passionate about and what their concerns are.
Communicating with users (and other people too)
Content Design by Sarah Winters (formerly Richards)
Wonderful book that I think popularized the term Content Design. The book is structured as a case study about a fictional organization, and brings the reader on the ride of how a content design project would likely be structured. It introduces research methods, gives lots of great information about synthesizing information and showing your findings, getting buy-in from stakeholders and making sure that projects continue to progress, and how to turn findings from research into solutions to problems.
Most books written by designers tend to do a good job of communicating complicated ideas in a clear and simple way, but this book is definitely the gold standard. It’s a very easy read, packed full of helpful information.
Great foundational text, and also a great book to reference often.
How to Make Sense of any Mess by Abby Covert
Probably the best intro to information architecture out there. It approaches IA as more than just sitemaps and diagrams, and instead treats IA as a process for untangling messes.
I really like this book for making complex tasks, like creating a taxonomy or approved vocabulary, feel very approachable. The book paints a clear picture of the types of workshops you’ll want to run with stakeholders, what types of metrics you’ll want to establish, and how to continue iterating based on what you learn from testing.
The only thing that the book doesn’t cover super explicitly is how to test things, but it makes sense that would be out of scope for the book.
Instead of talking about testing directly, the book establishes a really good framework for getting to the point where you can test, and then how to decide what you’re going to be looking for when doing the tests (what’s your goal, why are you doing it, what would success look like, how are you going to measure that, etc.).
Also appreciate that the entire book is online http://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/, which is super helpful for doing a quick search to reference anything.
Forms that Work by Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney + Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski + Designing UX: Forms by Jessica Enders
I’m combining all these as one read because they’re all very similar, but they each have a focus on slightly different niches:
Forms that Work is more focused on the UX process of learning business requirements, conversational design for writing labels and supplemental framing text, visual design of fields and forms, and testing + iteration
Web Form Design is more focused on visual design and some niche HTML aspects of designing forms
Designing UX: Forms is focused on UX process, visual design, and interaction design of forms
That’s how I think of them, at least! They’re all great, and I use all three as references pretty often.
Form design is a great niche for any designer to dig into, since it's a basic visual component (a label and input field) that can be arranged in a million different ways and needs several considerations such as:
writing of labels and helptext
alignment of fields
sizing of fields
spacing between fields
chunking between sections
etc.
Forms can also involve higher-level discussions like “why are we asking for a name, address, and phone number for people to sign up for our newsletter?”
It’s something that seems super simple, but becomes incredibly complicated once you’re trying to lay things out cleanly on a page and every combination of options seems wrong in a different way. Form design comes up a lot, so I’m a huge fan of these books.
Thanks for reading!
Hopefully this was helpful!
If you want to get in touch to talk about design, feel free to send an email to joey.pearlman@gmail.com .