What UX Professionals Are Reading — Pt. 2
More reading recommendations for aspiring and current UX designers
The other week I posted Part 1 of this list, which I compiled while attending the UX Strat conference in Boulder, CO this past Fall. As a beginner UX designer, just trying to start my career, I really wanted to take advantage of all of the wisdom and experience of the professionals in attendance from all over the world. So I asked them to kindly share books they recommend to new and experienced UX designers. Here is part 2 of their suggestions:
15. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb — “Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish.”
16. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel — “Many common study habits and practice routines turn out to be counterproductive. Underlining and highlighting, rereading, cramming, and single-minded repetition of new skills create the illusion of mastery, but gains fade quickly. More complex and durable learning come from self-testing, introducing certain difficulties in practice, waiting to re-study new material until a little forgetting has set in, and interleaving the practice of one skill or topic with another. Speaking most urgently to students, teachers, trainers, and athletes, Make It Stick will appeal to all those interested in the challenge of lifelong learning and self-improvement.”
17. UX for Lean Startups: Faster, Smarter User Experience Research and Design, Laura Klein — “Great user experiences (UX) are essential for products today, but designing one can be a lengthy and expensive process. With this practical, hands-on book, you’ll learn how to do it faster and smarter using Lean UX techniques. UX expert Laura Klein shows you what it takes to gather valuable input from customers, build something they’ll truly love, and reduce the time it takes to get your product to market.”
18. Liminal Thinking: Create the Change You Want by Changing the Way You Think, Dave Gray — “Why do some people succeed at change while others fail? It’s the way they think! Liminal thinking is a way to create change by understanding, shaping, and reframing beliefs. What beliefs are stopping you right now? You have a choice. You can create the world you want to live in, or live in a world created by others. If you are ready to start making changes, read this book.”
19. Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, Michael E. Porter — “Electrifying in its simplicity — like all great breakthroughs — Porter’s analysis of industries captures the complexity of industry competition in five underlying forces. Porter introduces one of the most powerful competitive tools yet developed: his three generic strategies — lowest cost, differentiation, and focus — which bring structure to the task of strategic positioning. He shows how competitive advantage can be defined in terms of relative cost and relative prices, thus linking it directly to profitability, and presents a whole new perspective on how profit is created and divided. In the almost two decades since publication, Porter’s framework for predicting competitor behavior has transformed the way in which companies look at their rivals and has given rise to the new discipline of competitor assessment.”
20. Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity, Charles Duhigg — “At the core of Smarter Faster Better are eight key productivity concepts — from motivation and goal setting to focus and decision making — that explain why some people and companies get so much done. Drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics — as well as the experiences of CEOs, educational reformers, four-star generals, FBI agents, airplane pilots, and Broadway songwriters — this painstakingly researched book explains that the most productive people, companies, and organizations don’t merely act differently.
They view the world, and their choices, in profoundly different ways.”
21. The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systems (Center for Environmental Structure), Christopher Alexander — “Using the example of his building of the Eishin Campus in Japan, Christopher Alexander and his collaborators reveal an ongoing dispute between two fundamentally different ways of shaping our world. One system places emphasis on subtleties, on finesse, on the structure of adaptation that makes each tiny part fit into the larger context. The other system is concerned with efficiency, with money, power and control, stressing the more gross aspects of size, speed, and profit. This second, “business-as-usual” system, Alexander argues, is incapable of creating the kind of environment that is able to genuinely support the emotional, whole-making side of human life. To confront this sterile system, the book presents a new architecture that we — both as a world-wide civilization, and as individual people and cultures — can create, using new processes that allow us to build places of human energy and beauty.”
22. Growing Wings on the Way: Systems Thinking for Messy Situations, Rosalind Armson — “thinking about them, we may try to ignore some aspect/s of them and — when we finally do something — they usually get worse. These problems are so entangled they become ‘messy situations’ and our first mistake is to try and fix them as we would fix a simple problem. But Systems Thinking offers a range of good ways of approaching these situations and unravelling them. Rosalind Armson is one of the world’s foremost teachers and practitioners of Systems Thinking, and her remarkable book explains how these messes happen and what to do about them.”
23. Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Creating Value through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams, James Kalbach — “Customers who have inconsistent, broken experiences with products and services are understandably frustrated. But it’s worse when people inside these companies can’t pinpoint the problem because they’re too focused on business processes. This practical book shows your company how to use alignment diagrams to turn valuable customer observations into actionable insight. With this unique tool, you can visually map your existing customer experience and envision future solutions.”
24. An Introduction to General Systems Thinking, Gerald M. Weinberg — “For more than twenty-five years, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking has been hailed as an innovative introduction to systems theory, with applications in computer science and beyond. Used in university courses and professional seminars all over the world, the text has proven its ability to open minds and sharpen thinking. Originally published in 1975 and reprinted more than twenty times over a quarter century — and now available for the first time from Dorset House Publishing — the text uses clear writing and basic algebraic principles to explore new approaches to projects, products, organizations, and virtually any kind of system.”
25. Systems Thinking Made Simple: New Hope for Solving Wicked Problems, Derek Cabrera & Laura Cabrera — “Systems thinking can help us solve everyday and wicked problems, increase our personal effectiveness as human beings, and transform our organizations. This book is for anyone interested in learning the foundational ideas of systems thinking.”
26. Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Donella H. Meadows — “Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life. Some of the biggest problems facing the world―war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation―are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking.”
27. The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt, Robert I. Sutton — “Sutton starts with diagnosis — what kind of asshole problem, exactly, are you dealing with? From there, he provides field-tested, evidence-based, and sometimes surprising strategies for dealing with the rude, impolite, irritating, unpleasant, or just plain incompetent — avoiding them, outwitting them, disarming them, sending them packing, and developing protective psychological armor. Sutton even teaches readers how to look inward to stifle their own inner jackass.”
This list isn’t in any particular order, but hopefully there is a book on there that would be of benefit to you no matter what your focus, specialty, or skill level is. Again, these were recommended by professionals in the UX industry who were in attendance of UX Strat conference, which had speakers from Facebook, Google, Amazon, Disney, etc. I hope that you’ve added a few books to your personal reading list, and please comment below if you have any books to add to this list!
