Selected readings on user experience design

These are some of my favorite reference books on various stages of user-experience design.

Initial research

Practical Empathy: For Collaboration and Creativity in Your Work, Young
- A great resource to read to improve your ability to interact with people (not just your research subjects).
Qualitative Research Practice: A Guide for Social Science Students and Researchers, Ritchie et al.
- Handy qualitative reference with lots of examples.
Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches, Bernard
- Detailed information on all stages of qualitative research. Great reference (5^th ed , out now) Good resource to answer questions that might arise from the preceding text.
Rapid Contextual Design: A How-to Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design (Interactive Technologies), Holtzblatt et al.
- Methods and tips for researching towards a goal of designing a solution.

Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life, Csikszentmihalyi
- What your users really want from a user experience.
Usability Engineering 1st Edition, Nielsen
- Designing software for humans (the examples are showing their age, but the ideas remain sound).
The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition, Norman
- A perspective on what customers think of clever designs.
Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (3rd Edition), Krug
- How to apply usability engineering to web interfaces. I have the 2^nd Apparently the 3^rd (current) edition applies these principles to mobile interfaces.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity 1st Edition, Cooper
- “The” persona book—where they all began (as far as software goes).
Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design 1st Edition, Buxton
- Techniques on how to turn your research and ideas into something tangible and usable.
Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design 2nd Edition, Tidwell
- Tips (and principles) for solid user interface design.
Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience, 1st Edition, Greever
- How to explain what you’ve done based on the preceding texts to people who haven’t read (any) of them.

Usability Testing Essentials: Ready, Set…Test! 1st Edition, Barnum
- How to test and report on the usability of a product (or website)
How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business 3rd Edition, Hubbard
- Not a stats book (although it include some stats), it’s more about how to operationalize goals and objectives into something that can actually be measured, which is probably the most important aspect of any goal that you want to track.
Measuring the User Experience, Second Edition: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics 2nd Edition, Albert & Tullis
- Like How to Measure Anything, but focuses on user experience-related applications.
Quantifying the User Experience, Second Edition: Practical Statistics for User Research 2nd Edition, Sauro
- Describes how to collect, interpret, and present statistics that describe the user experience. I have the first edition, which is very good, so this 2^nd edition must be even better.
Statistics for People Who (Think They) Hate Statistics 6th Edition, Salkind
- In the (unlikely) event the previous book doesn’t explain the statistics you’re using well enough, this provides additional details. I have the 3^rd and 4^th editions, which vary only slightly. Not sure what sets the current (6^th) edition apart from the earlier versions.

Last update: Jan 28, 2018