Tom asked me for a list of things to look at to learn more about ‘UX’ a little while ago. I promised him a blog post and then promply got sidetracked by work and having a baby. I’m back on the case now and I figured I might as well share this with the blog too.
So, a brain dump of books/sites which I’ve attempted to add some structure to follows. I’ve stuck to stuff I’ve actually read or are in the process of reading initially:
Firstly, the book which gets lots of people interested and which we now class as pretty much mandatory reading for our clients (we often buy them a copy), let alone ourselves is Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think.
I first got into this stuff reading the work of Nielsen, Norman et. al. so:
- Alertbox – Jakob Nielsen
- The Design of Everyday Things – Don Norman (originally published as The Psychology of Everyday Things and updated in The Design of Everyday Things – but I don’t really know how much difference there is between them – any opinions?)
Overview / UX process:
- The Elements of User Experience – Jesse James Garrett
Usability testing:
- Usability Engineering – Jakob Nielsen
User research and presentation:
- Rapid Contextual Design – Karen Holtzblatt, Jessamyn Burns Wendell, Shelley Wood
- Communicating Design – Dan Brown
- The User is Always Right – Steve Mulder
- Disambiguity – Leisa Reichelt
Information architecture:
- Information Architecture for the World Wide Web – Louis Rosenfeld
- Information Architecture Handbook – Eric L. Reiss
- Card Sorting – Donna Spencer
- Boxes and Arrows
Interface design:
- User Interface Design for Programmers – Joel Spolsky
- Designing Interfaces – Jenifer Tidwell
Interaction design / inspiration:
- Analog in, Digital Out – Brendan Dawes
- Designing Interactions – B Moggridge
And stuff I’ve got lined up to read or am planning to read:
- Contextual Design – Hugh Beyer, Karen Holtzblatt
- About Face 3 – Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin
- Observing the User Experience – Mike Kuniavsky
- Mental Models – Indi Young
Here are some other folks’ lists:
- http://whitneyhess.com/blog/2009/06/30/so-you-wanna-be-a-user-experience-designer-step-1-resources/
- http://www.amazon.co.uk/User-Experience-Reading-List/lm/2OWXDHHPFH23O
- http://interactiondesign.sva.edu/blog/entry/requested_reading_recommendations/
Any more anybody?
