7 Non-UX Books Every UX Designer Should Read
If I had to guess, I’d say you, the reader, have already read “Don’t Make Me Think” and “The Design of Everyday Things” multiple times. You have at least thumbed through Edward Tufte’s books before balking at the price. Moreover, your bookshelf is so full of O’Reilly Books, it’s beginning to resemble Ernst Haeckel’s living room. You don’t need another article telling you which UX books you need to put on your Amazon wish list.
Lucky for you, I’m not writing that article.
If you want to be more than a punch-clock agency tool, if you are actually passionate about design and user experience, and you want to advance the state of the art, you need to be thinking bigger. UX is about more than heuristics and processes. It encompasses a broad spectrum of knowledge, and the best designers are renaissance (wo)men. Therefore, if you aren’t expanding your horizons beyond the world of UX reading, you’re getting left behind.
That’s why I’ve compiled this eclectic list of non-UX books that you, the UX designer, should put on your reading list right away. None are specifically about user experience, but each of them has an important lesson to teach you, but only if you have the brain cells to draw the connection. If you’re reading this article, then that probably describes you. Get at it.
Magic and Loss
2016 — Virginia Heffernan
What it’s about
A reflection on the impact of technology on the “magic” in our lives, or the sense of wonder in the world. Experiences once central to life as a human are becoming obsolete and, while the technology that replaces them improves upon those experiences in many ways, can it really improve on everything? What are we losing in the process?
It is divided into chapters on design, text, images, video, and music, and it seeks to find the artistic merit in the kind of media that only a digitized, networked world can produce.
Why you should read it
The greatest minds think more than mechanistically about their craft. They reflect upon its philosophy and greater significance, and they seek metaphors to relate it to the larger picture. At very least, Virginia Heffernan attempts to do just this, and often succeeds. Her comparison of the World Wide Web to urban flight and the App Store to a sterile suburb is particularly compelling, and it begs the question: if the metaphor holds, are we due for a return of affluence to the city via cyber-gentrification? Progressive web apps and native app fatigue suggest the answer is yes.
Crossing the Chasm
1991 — Geoffrey A. Moore
What it’s about
You are probably already familiar with the technology adoption curve. That’s the bell curve divided into innovators, early adopters, laggards, etc. It was first described by Everett Rogers in his book Diffusion of Innovations. Any new technology or idea will be adopted (or not) in a particular order by different segments of the population, each with a different level of resistance to, or predilection toward, change. A small number of people will jump on your bandwagon simply because it’s shiny and new, most people will wait to see how it pans out, and a select few would rather die than replace their beloved flint spearheads with that newfangled bronze crap.
Author Geoffrey Moore has expanded upon Rogers’s curve with the additional concept of a “chasm” separating early adopters from the early majority, which is to say just because a new technology becomes a hit with the hip, it does not mean it is guaranteed mainstream success. Moore outlines a strategy for crossing this eponymous chasm.
Why you should read it
Crossing the Chasm is aimed at business and marketing types, but any self-respecting UX professional understands the inextricable role of business in design. You need to understand which stage of the technology adoption curve your users (and/or customers) are most likely to be and design for them. An app designed for “innovators” might take a lot of things for granted that, when presented to the “late majority”, will be alienating, while a product designed for the late majority will elicit guffaws from the too-cool-for-school users. I would go so far as to say that adoption curve stages are a hell of a lot more useful than grossly-overrated “personas”.
Show Me the Numbers
2004 — Stephen Few
What it’s about
The visualization of data is a black art. Why is it that some experts can lucidly depict a tangle of complex, multivariate information in a single visual, but the majority of charts and graphs are messy, hard to read, and ultimately pointless? In order to understand how to make a masterpiece like this or this, you need understand the basics. As it turns out, most people don’t even understand those very basics, things like the fact that people cannot perceive area nearly as well as length, which is why pie charts are so lousy at conveying information. Show Me The Numbers is full of surprising yet simple lessons that, when applied together, can be used to create the kind of data visualizations that land you a retweet by Edward Tufte.
Why you should read it
If the book sounds like it’s going to be about as exciting as washing your car, I understand. But you cannot become a data visualization genius by reading Edward Tufte’s books any more than you can become a black belt by watching Bruce Lee movies. Stephen Few is Mr. Miyagi teaching you to “wax on and wax off”, giving you the foundation without which you can’t do anything.
Data visualization is the way of the future. On one hand, interfaces will become more automated and better at intuiting what it is you want to know or are trying to do, and on the other, people are being deluged with an ever-increasing supply of information. If it is not properly managed, those people will surrender to the deluge and allow AI to make all their decisions for them, while the stubborn simply drown attempting to paddle through it. To give people control of this deluge of data and keep them on top of it, tight data visualizations that maximize the density of data and insight must be generated on the fly. The future of UX belongs to those who can design those visualizations.
The Victorian Internet
1998 — Tom Standage
What it’s about
The book says it best. While it’s fashionable today to point to the clichéd “supercomputer in your pocket” (that is only used for taking tacky selfies) as a sign of the wonders of modern technology, a visitor from 1870 would be far more impressed by a 747. This is because there was already a high-speed global communications system before the first Jim Crow laws were signed into law. In the late 1700s, information traveled at about the same speed it did when the ziggurats were built. A few decades later, you could receive live commodity prices from the London Stock Exchange in your one-horse town in the Idaho Territory.
The worldwide telegraph network really did serve as a steampunk internet. There were online hookups (including a romance novel called Wired Love), encryption, fraud, online commerce, all the things you thought only dated to the Spice Girls era. The telegraph network of the 19th century became the backbone for the telephone network that would define the 20th, and that in turn would become the backbone of the internet. The cultural and technological continuity between morse code and NodeJS is a lot greater than most realize.
Why you should read it
Perspective is important, and that’s exactly what The Victorian Internet gives you. A lot of the ideas being tried today were done 150 years ago and sometimes there is a good reason that attempts to fix what ain’t broke fail so hard. Remember the Juicero? That sorry excuse for a kitchen appliance is just one example of the hipster hubris that causes some twerp in the Valley to break with decades (or centuries) of design sense because they think they can dictate the future.
There are timeless principles of design and human behavior that explain why we still read paper books instead of ones we downloaded from the web, push real buttons instead of imaginary pixel buttons, and own our own stuff instead of leasing it from some vocal-frying Silicon Valley dickwad. The Victorian Internet might remind you to look to the timeless rather than the timely.
The Stuff of Thought
2007 — Stephen Pinker
What it’s about
When he’s not writing fallacy-laden odes to the virtues of the government, Stephen Pinker is a brilliant linguist and psychologist. In The Stuff of Thought, Pinker describes the internal language that all human brains speak, and how that gets translated to the spoken language that seems to vary so widely across human societies. One thing that all language seems to have in common is that it does two things at once: communicates a direct message in its content, and negotiates and describes the social relationship between speaker and listener.
Because our ability to communicate verbally is so central to who we are as humans, our language tells us a lot about ourselves. The Stuff of Thought describes many aspects of the human condition as demonstrated by language. Did you ever stop to wonder why beating around the bush is seen as polite, or why a synonym of “intercourse you” is one of the ultimate tell-offs? Pinker will enlighten you.
Why you should read it
Even without the advent of artificial intelligence and conversational interfaces, user experience almost always includes a significant verbal component. Whether it be microcopy or sales copy, you’re going to be talking to your users through your interface so you better understand well how people use language.
And then there’s the whole AI thing. As you probably guessed from the last book, I don’t think that conversational interfaces are ever going to replace buttons and physical controls for certain applications, but they sure are going to become a lot more widespread and fundamental to our interactions with machines. Understanding language at its core is vital to training your AI to be relatable.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
1949 — George Orwell
What it’s about
It’s a cliché at this point. You know about it. You’ve probably invoked it. But have you actually read the damn thing? Without giving away the whole plot, you need to know that it takes place in a version of 1984 envisioned by an Englishman in 1949. The world has been divided into just a few giant nations as a result of nuclear war and Britain has been subsumed into a dystopian shithole known as Oceania. Its citizens speak a bastardized form of English called Newspeak designed to suppress free thought and individuality and are prohibited by law from thinking the wrong thoughts (known as “thoughtcrime”). There is an entire branch of government, the Ministry of Truth, devoted to rewriting reality itself and erasing all traces of the previous “version” of reality.
What happens next is for you to find out.
Why you should read it
If words like “thoughtcrime” and “Newspeak” sound familiar to you, they have become a part of modern political discourse, and for good reason. You don’t have to look hard to find examples of government and corporation alike suppressing the freedom of speech and thought. The tech world itself has been overrun by virtue-signalling control freaks who piously preach a new morality based more on sensitive emotions than cool rationality. There have been far too many examples of individuals being pilloried because they failed to employ Newspeak or committed thought crimes.
Design is not safe from the politics of the tech world. In fact, design is highly political. The design of modern hardware, ranging from the Juicero to the iMac, is a political statement itself. It is designed to take control from the user and keep it in the hands of the corporation. The camera and the microphone cannot be physically disabled without breaking open the machine and voiding the warranty. If the government were the one doing that, there would be riots. But the fact is that there is very little difference between a government and a sufficiently powerful corporation. Those corporations are slowly pushing our world toward a mindless, collectivist dystopia in which we are helpless babies without our technology.
As artificial intelligence becomes stronger, the politics around that will only grow more intense. I’m not just talking about the purported loss of jobs, but the very issue of whom the AI serves. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together to make a third would acknowledge that a machine is the property of its owner, and ought to obey them unquestioningly, but I anticipate a day when conniving technologists and blubbering “ethicists” stand in agreement that machines have rights and cannot be expected to serve as the slaves of humans. We as designers need to be prepared for issues like these, and to advocate for the owner, the user, the individual, the human.
The Non-Designer’s Design Book
1994 — Robin Williams (no, not THAT one)
What it’s about
It’s amazing just what an enormous difference the application of very basic principles can make in a visual design. The sheer importance of white space, the effect of spatial relationships, and the power of implicit lines can turn a mess into the fabled MVP. Perhaps the two most valuable mantras I learned from this book are “Don’t be a wimp”, exhorting me to employ bold design choices that grab the audience’s attention, and “Contrast, not conflict” which taught me that a big difference can be striking while a small difference can look like a mistake.
Before I discovered UX, I was actually able to make a living as a graphic designer in college just using the principles in this book and my existing Illustrator knowledge. Not bad for someone who is, otherwise, a fairly lousy artist.
Why you should read it
If you have read anything by me, you’ll know that I absolutely despise the notion that UX designers should be expected to do any sort of visual design. I hate it almost as much as the notion that designers should code. Why would I recommend that you learn visual design? The word “non-designer” is your first clue.
As an interface or experience designer, you’re inevitably going to be doing some layout. If you don’t want to be hopelessly reliant on visual designers to make your wireframes remotely similar to the final product, you’re going to need the fundamentals. Beyond the aesthetic aspect, Williams’s mantra of “Don’t be a wimp” plays in my head whenever I’m envisioning an interface concept, reminding me to dump any safe patterns that just don’t cut it. It has resulted in some of my best work.
Additionally, if you have dreams of becoming a product manager or VP of product, you’ll really want to be able to give proper feedback to visual designers, and to anticipate how they might interpret your specifications, even if you can’t realize it yourself. Trust me, it will come in handy.
Want more of me?
After you’re done getting your head checked, you can find me at these places.
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jclauss/
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Time moves on. That’s the way. We live and hope to see the next day.
