While there are many courses and tutorials online, learning from a book is still one of the best ways to greatly improve your skills. Below I have selected top User Experience books.
- Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (3rd Edition) (Voices That Matter) (2014)
- The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide (2013)
- UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want (2015)
- The User’s Journey: Storymapping Products That People Love (2016)
- The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond (2nd Edition) (Voices That Matter) (2010)
- UX for Beginners: A Crash Course in 100 Short Lessons (2016)
- UX Methods: A Quick Guide to User Experience Research Methods (2017)
- Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Creating Value through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams (2016)
- Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience (2015)
- The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition (2013)
- Think Like a UX Researcher (2019)
- 101 UX Principles: A definitive design guide (2018)
- Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics (Interactive Technologies) (2013)
- Benchmarking the User Experience (2018)
Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (3rd Edition) (Voices That Matter) (2014)
Since Don’t Make Me Think was first published in 2000, hundreds of thousands of Web designers and developers have relied on usability guru Steve Krug’s guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design. Witty, commonsensical, and eminently practical, it’s one of the best-loved and most recommended books on the subject.
The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide (2013)
The User Experience Team of One prescribes a range of approaches that have big impact and take less time and fewer resources than the standard lineup of UX deliverables. Whether you want to cross over into user experience or you’re a seasoned practitioner trying to drag your organization forward, this book gives you tools and insight for doing more with less.
UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want (2015)
User experience (UX) strategy requires a careful blend of business strategy and UX design, but until now, there hasn’t been an easy-to-apply framework for executing it.
The User’s Journey: Storymapping Products That People Love (2016)
Like a good story, successful design is a series of engaging moments structured over time. The User’s Journey will show you how, when, and why to use narrative structure, technique, and principles to ideate, craft, and test a cohesive vision for an engaging outcome. See how a story first approach can transform your product, feature, landing page, flow, campaign, content, or product strategy.
The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond (2nd Edition) (Voices That Matter) (2010)
From the moment it was published almost ten years ago, Elements of User Experience became a vital reference for web and interaction designers the world over, and has come to define the core principles of the practice. Now, in this updated, expanded, and full-color new edition, Jesse James Garrett has refined his thinking about the Web, going beyond the desktop to include information that also applies to the sudden proliferation of mobile devices and applications.
UX for Beginners: A Crash Course in 100 Short Lessons (2016)
Apps! Websites! Rubber Ducks! Naked Ninjas! This book has everything. If you want to get started in user experience design (UX), you’ve come to the right place: 100 self-contained lessons that cover the whole spectrum of fundamentals.Forget dry, technical material.
UX Methods: A Quick Guide to User Experience Research Methods (2017)
UX Methods features 50 different research methods. Each method has concise instructions aimed at getting you in the field gathering insights as quickly as possible. A visual example in storyboard form is included with each method. Readers will quickly find a wide range of methods they can apply in numerous situations.
Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Creating Value through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams (2016)
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.
Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience (2015)
Every designer has had to justify designs to non-designers, yet most lack the ability to explain themselves in a way that is compelling and fosters agreement. The ability to effectively articulate design decisions is critical to the success of a project, because the most articulate person often wins.
The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition (2013)
Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious — even liberating — book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology.
Think Like a UX Researcher (2019)
Think Like a UX Researcher will challenge your preconceptions about user experience (UX) research and encourage you to think beyond the obvious. You’ll discover how to plan and conduct UX research, analyze data, persuade teams to take action on the results and build a career in UX. The book will help you take a more strategic view of product design so you can focus on optimizing the user’s experience.
101 UX Principles: A definitive design guide (2018)
We want our UX to be brilliant. We want to create stunning user experiences. We want our UX to drive the success of our business with useful and usable software products.
Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics (Interactive Technologies) (2013)
Measuring the User Experience was the first book that focused on how to quantify the user experience. Now in the second edition, the authors include new material on how recent technologies have made it easier and more effective to collect a broader range of data about the user experience. As more UX and web professionals need to justify their design decisions with solid, reliable data, Measuring the User Experience provides the quantitative analysis training that these professionals need.
Benchmarking the User Experience (2018)
Benchmarking the User Experience is a practical book about how to measure the user experience of websites, software, mobile apps, products, or just about anything people use. This book is for UX researchers, designers, product owners, or anyone who has a vested interest in improving the experience of websites and products.
Best User Experience Books You Should Read
We highly recommend you to buy all paper or e-books in a legal way, for example, on Amazon. But sometimes it might be a need to dig deeper beyond the shiny book cover. Before making a purchase, you can visit resources like Library Genesis and download some user experience books mentioned below at your own risk. Once again, we do not host any illegal or copyrighted files, but simply give our visitors a choice and hope they will make a wise decision.
Interfaces and Us: User Experience Design and the Making of the Computable Subject
Author(s): Zachary Kaiser
ID: 3624615, Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, Year: 2023, Size: 5 Mb, Format: pdf
Understanding Users: Designing Experience through Layers of Meaning
Author(s): Andrew Dillon
ID: 3644010, Publisher: Routledge, Year: 2023, Size: 9 Mb, Format: pdf
Building Modern CLI Applications in Go: Develop next-level CLIs to improve user experience, increase platform usage, and maximize production
Author(s): Marian Montagnino
ID: 3682760, Publisher: Packt Publishing, Year: 2023, Size: 9 Mb, Format: pdf
Please note that this booklist is not definite. Some books are truly best-sellers according to Los Angeles Times, others are drafted by unknown writers. On top of that, you can always find additional tutorials and courses on Coursera, Udemy or edX, for example. Are there any other relevant links you could recommend? Leave a comment if you have any feedback on the list.