How can anyone be passionate about great UX design and user research but not have favourite web and mobile sites, apps, design books and quotes? I do have a lot of favourites illustrating good design and user research. Feel free to browse.

Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible”

― Don Norman, from ‘The Design of Everyday Things’

From a recent workshop, products that use good design to fit users’ needs so well that users’ are immersed into the experience, the good design elements feel invisible: Sunrise Calendar (SADLY deceased), Dropbox, Paper, Alessi citrus-squeezer (Juicy Salif), London Underground, Yummly app, Airbnb

UX Design & User Research

Top current reads on my UX Design & User Research Bookshelf

‘Mobile User Experience: Patterns to Make Sense of it All’
by Adrian Mendoza
A Favourite book – looking at how mobile works, the interface elements looking both at Android and iOS, and how to prototype and test in mobile.

‘Simple and Usable’
by Giles Colborne
A great book on the ultimate point of designing a great user experience.

‘Simplicity in the Details: Designing Faster Web and Mobile Interactions’
by Giles Colborne
A FAB book, I LOVE the examples in this – such a clear, concise look at designing the user experience.

‘Learning Responsive Web Design’
by Clarissa Peterson
A great book that includes writing responsive code.

‘Accessibility Handbook’
by Katie Cunningham
A useful book that covers designing for blindness, vision and hearing impairments, colour blindness and cognitive disorders.

‘Sketching User Experiences: The Workbook’
by Bill Buxton, Saul Greenberg, Sheelagh Carpendale & Nicolai Marquardt
A practical and useful book. It looks at how one can sketch to brainstorm, find ideas, and how to iterate and refine your designs. Encourages you to be more creative with ideas and how to find inspiration from everything around you.

‘Microinteractions: Designing with Details’
by Dan Saffer
Helps you focus on the interactive details that form your design with an outcome of highly accurate designs to capture user behaviour.

‘Storytelling for User Experience’
by Whitney Quesenbery & Kevin Brooks
It goes through how storytelling can aid your understanding of your site users helping you design.

’Mental Models’
by Indi Young
Looks at how understanding a users mental representation can guide your designs.

‘A Practical Guide to Information Architecture’
by Donna Spencer
I Love this book – it’s a comprehensive aid to organising a website/app as well as non-web, highlighting the methods you can use, looking at your projects’ context, goals, stakeholders, technology opportunities/constraints, design constraints, the culture you are working within and how that can affect your project.

‘Card Sorting’
by Donna Spencer
This book helps you think about content and categories and how you can group information so people can easily find and understand it.

‘The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide’
by Leah Buley
A Fabulous book – Love the “If you only do one thing…” sections in each chapter.

‘UX for Lean Startups: Faster, Smarter User Experience Research and Design’
by Laura Klein
Using a lean methodology, how to quickly gather useful customer research, to build something users will want to use and usable products. It highlights useful and proven tips and tools for researching and designing an intuitive, usable product.

‘Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience’
by Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden
How to gather user feedback early and validate your ideas with real users in an agile iterative design process.

‘User Story Mapping’
by Jeff Patton
This is aimed at agile/lean projects and shows how user stories work so you can focus on users and their experience.

Bookmarks