7 Must Read UX Books

Here are top 7 books that UX designer will be able to glean some useful information from.

1. Don’t Make Me Think

Don't Make Me Think is a book by Steve Krug about human-computer interaction and web usability. The book's premise is that a good software program or web site should let users accomplish their intended tasks as easily and directly as possible.

Originally published: 2000
Author: Steve Krug
Page count: 216

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.

Now Steve returns with the fresh perspective to reexamine the principles that made Don’t Make Me Think a classic–with updated examples and a new chapter on mobile usability. And it’s still short, profusely illustrated…and best of all–fun to read.

If you’ve read it before, you’ll rediscover what made Don’t Make Me Think so essential to Web designers and developers around the world. If you’ve never read it, you’ll see why so many people have said it should be required reading for anyone working on Web sites.


2. Rocket Surgery Made Easy - The Do-it-yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems.
Also by Steve Krug, this book is an essential one to read for designers doing usability testing. It is one of the best resources for learning how to plan and conduct user tests on your product.

Originally published: 2009
Author: Steve Krug
Page count: 161

It's been known for years that usability testing can dramatically improve products. But with a typical price tag of $5,000 to $10,000 for a usability consultant to conduct each round of tests, it rarely happens.

In this how-to companion to Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Steve Krug spells out a streamlined approach to usability testing that anyone can easily apply to their own Web site, application, or other product. (As he said in Don't Make Me Think, "It's not rocket surgery".)

Using practical advice, plenty of illustrations, and his trademark humor, Steve explains how to:

• Test any design, from a sketch on a napkin to a fully-functioning Web site or application
• Keep your focus on finding the most important problems (because no one has the time or resources to fix them all)
• Fix the problems that you find, using his "The least you can do" approach

By paring the process of testing and fixing products down to its essentials ("A morning a month, that's all we ask"), Rocket Surgery makes it realistic for teams to test early and often, catching problems while it's still easy to fix them. Rocket Surgery Made Easy adds demonstration videos to the proven mix of clear writing, before-and-after examples, witty illustrations, and practical advice that made Don't Make Me Think so popular.


3. Usable Usability: Simple Steps for Making Stuff Better
This is the perfect intro and in-depth examination of what usability is. It discusses why usability is important and provides an overview of different usability concepts. It’s an invaluable tool for anyone performing usability testing.

Originally published: 2012
Author: Eric Reiss
Page count: 256

The A-to-Z guide to spotting and fixing usability problems

Frustrated by pop-ups? Forms that make you start over if you miss a field? Nonsensical error messages? You're not alone! This book helps you simply get it right the first time (or fix what's broken). Boasting a full-color interior packed with design and layout examples, this book teaches you how to understand a user's needs, divulges techniques for exceeding a user's expectations, and provides a host of hard won advice for improving the overall quality of a user's experience. World-renowned UX guru Eric Reiss shares his knowledge from decades of experience making products usable for everyone...all in an engaging, easy-to-apply manner.

• Reveals proven tools that simply make products better, from the users' perspective
• Provides simple guidelines and checklists to help you evaluate and improve your own products
• Zeroes in on essential elements to consider when planning a product, such as its functionality and responsiveness, whether or not it is ergonomic, making it foolproof, and more
• Addresses considerations for product clarity, including its visibility, understandability, logicalness, consistency, and predictability

Usable Usability walks you through numerous techniques that will help ensure happy customers and successful products!

4. Smashing UX Design: Foundations for Designing Online User Experiences - The ultimate guide to UX from the world’s most popular resource for web designers and developers. 

This book is the UX Bible. It discusses the basics of user-centered design and the philosophies it is based upon, and it walks you through the how-tos of everything from user research to wireframing, providing case studies for each.

Originally published: 2012
Authors: Jesmond J. Allen, James J. Chudley
Page count: 288

Smashing Magazine is the world′s most popular resource for web designers and developers and with this book, the authors provide the ideal resource for mastering User Experience Design (UX). 

The authors provide an overview of UX and User Centred Design and examine in detail sixteen of the most common UX design and research tools and techniques for your web projects. 

The authors share their top tips from their collective 30 years of working in UX including:

• Guides to when and how to use the most appropriate UX research and design techniques such as usability testing, prototyping, wireframing, sketching, information architecture & running workshops
• How to plan UX projects to suit different budgets, time constraints, and business objectives
• Case studies from real UX projects that explain how particular techniques were used to achieve the client's goals
• Checklists to help you choose the right UX tools and techniques for the job at hand
• Typical user and business requirements to consider when designing business critical pages such as homepages, forms, product pages and mobile interfaces as well as explanations of key things to consider when designing for mobile, internationalization and behavioral change.

Smashing UX Design is the complete UX reference manual. Treat it as the UX expert on your bookshelf that you can read from cover-to-cover, or to dip into as the need arises, regardless of whether you have 'UX' in your job title or not.

5. Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience

This book discusses important UX principles and techniques, how to experiment with design ideas, and how to continually adjust your designs based on research and testing. It has received many awards and is a valuable resource for UX designers who want to keep getting leaner.

Originally published: 2013
Authors: Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden
Page count: 152

The Lean UX approach to interaction design is tailor-made for today’s web-driven reality. In this insightful book, leading advocate Jeff Gothelf teaches you valuable Lean UX principles, tactics, and techniques from the ground up—how to rapidly experiment with design ideas, validate them with real users, and continually adjust your design based on what you learn.

Inspired by Lean and Agile development theories, Lean UX lets you focus on the actual experience being designed, rather than deliverables. This book shows you how to collaborate closely with other members of the product team, and gather feedback early and often. You’ll learn how to drive the design in short, iterative cycles to assess what works best for the business and the user. Lean UX shows you how to make this change—for the better.

• Frame a vision of the problem you’re solving and focus your team on the right outcomes
• Bring the designers’ toolkit to the rest of your product team
• Share your insights with your team much earlier in the process
• Create Minimum Viable Products to determine which ideas are valid
• Incorporate the voice of the customer throughout the project cycle
• Make your team more productive: combine Lean UX with Agile’s Scrum framework
• Understand the organizational shifts necessary to integrate Lean UX

Lean UX received the 2013 Jolt Award from Dr. Dobb's Journal as the best book of the year. The publication's panel of judges chose five notable books, published during a 12-month period ending June 30, that every serious programmer should read.

6. Mobile Usability

One of the few books devoted to mobile UX, this book discusses some of the difficulties involved in designing for mobile. It also offers a number of solutions for improving mobile design techniques.

Originally published: 2013
Authors: Jakob Nielsen, Raluca Budiu
Page count: 203

How do we create a satisfactory user experience when limited to a small device? This new guide focuses on usability for mobile devices, primarily smartphones, and touchphones, and covers such topics as developing a mobile strategy, designing for small screens, writing for mobile, usability comparisons, and looking toward the future. The book includes 228-full color illustrations to demonstrate the points.

Based on expert reviews and international studies with participants ranging from students to early technology adopters and business people using websites on a variety of mobile devices, this guide offers a complete look at the landscape for a mobile world.

Author Jakob Nielsen is considered one of the world's leading experts on Web usability. He is the author of numerous best-selling books, including Prioritizing Web Usability and the groundbreaking Designing Web Usability, which has sold more than 250,000 copies and has been translated into 22 languages.

7. 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People

Designers might be great at designing beautiful work, but if they don’t understand people, their work won’t have the impact they want. This book helps users learn about consumer behavior and needs, and how to tap into those elements through design.

Originally published: 2011
Author: Susan Weinschenk
Page count: 256

We design to elicit responses from people. We want them to buy something, read more, or take action of some kind. Designing without understanding what makes people act the way they do is like exploring a new city without a map: results will be haphazard, confusing, and inefficient. This book combines real science and research with practical examples to deliver a guide every designer needs. With it, you’ll be able to design more intuitive and engaging work for print, websites, applications, and products that match the way people think, work and play.

Learn to increase the effectiveness, conversion rates, and usability of your own design projects by finding the answers to questions such as:

• What grabs and holds attention on a page or screen?
• What makes memories stick?
• What is more important, peripheral or central vision?
• How can you predict the types of errors that people will make?
• What is the limit to someone’s social circle?
• How do you motivate people to continue on to (the next step?
• What line length of the text is best?
• Are some fonts better than others?

These are just a few of the questions that the book answers in its deep-dive exploration of what makes people tick.

source reference : https://books.google.co.in and https://creativemarket.com/blog/10-must-read-ux-books