3 Books That Will Change Your Outlook On UX
You’d be missing out on some of the greatest insights into the craft of UX if you neglected the fantastic wealth of literary resources available, but it can be difficult finding which to read and what’s actually worth the investment, with the sheer quantity ofbooks available sometimes becoming a bit overbearing.
This article isn’t a beginner’s book list on UX, of course there’s no barrier to entry here and everybody would both enjoy & benefit from these 3 books, but I’ve put together this list to talk about books that have had an important impact on my UX ability, and hopefully will for you too!
Evil by Design
They say that the best way to sell a product is by satisfying one of the seven cardinal sins — and Evil by Design explores how this is just as true for UX and Interaction Design.
Persuasive design is the central idea of this book, and it gives great insight to the reader how the patterns of classical ‘evil’ are employed in our everyday lives to make us better consumers, for example the utilisation of sloth by ensuring a path of least resistance, taking the user exactly where you want them to go. It can be distressing learning about all of the dark patterns that are commonly used in the world of UX, and whilst it is fascinating and entertaining to learn about dark psychology, it is equally as important for us as designers to recognise these methods to ensure that we are providing our users with an ethical experience, aimed at their benefit, not our profit.
Steal like an Artist
Steal Like an Artist is a fantastic book that explores creativity in the digital era, arguing that no creation is original, and the true masters of crafts come from those who accept inspiration and influence freely rather than reject it out of fear of lacking originality.
As UX Designers it’s important for us to collect and gather unique, effective and inspirational thoughts and designs that we see around us everyday — Sure they might not alway be applicable to the projects we’re working on, but with the massive influx in apps, content and ideas daily in the modern age, it’s almost a guarantee that we’ll find something that can be used to help us improve a feature or design that we’re working on.
There’s so many more, and much better articulated ideas within this book, and I definitely recommend picking it up as it’s also quite a rapid read!
Design for the Real World: Human Ecology & Social Change
Written in 1972 yet still in many cases unfortunately just as applicable in the 21st century, Design for the Real World is a must read for not only UX Designers, but any designer full stop.
This book helped lay the foundations for the humanitarian design movement that emerged in the 80s, targeting the roots of wasteful, harmful and environmentally unfriendly design that remain in place today, detached from the everyday lives of people, andis a fantastic primer for thought.
One of Papaneks pieces of advice for designers that I found interesting, holds true today, stating that a designer would move to a specific part of a country in which they are working in, and become a ‘seed’ of sorts training other designers to create within this particular population group, which we can learn a huge deal from as UX Designers as we aim to serve our own core demographics better, rather than giving them generic experiences (of course, you may not want to move country entirely, but the idea here is what’s important).
In Summary
It’s impossible to cut down my favourite UX books into just 3, there’s just too much quality work out there, but hopefully after reading through this I’ve given you some interesting and insightful reads to add to your library that may give you some lightbulb moments as they did for me!
Every booklist I write for UX, I find myself wanting to talk about so many more; and I plan to! Drop a follow if you found this article interesting and want to learn more about UX, or engage with me in some interesting experience design exploration!
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