(For background, I'm a faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute) For best books, it depends on if you want to understand users or do implementation. But generally, I'd highly recommend Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things to improve how you look at the world, and Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think for simple and practical design tips. For tools, the best is paper prototyping, where you have your team just draw it out on paper and simulate the UI. It's simple, fast, and cheap, and from a cognitive perspective, you can explore more of the design…
If I may offer a contrarian viewpoint, I very much disliked Norman's book. I'm no UX professional, but I was looking for a pragmatic guide to understanding design and instead I was put off by his condescending tone and typecasting of engineers as somehow being innately unable to understand users. That was especially true of the earlier chapters of the book that were apparently first published in the original early '90s edition. The newly added chapters in the newer edition are more level-headed in that regard. Seeing how strongly this book was recommended in certain quarters left me…
I've got a tie between two books: 1) Design of Everyday Things by Dan Norman This book ruined my life. I highly recommend it. Every engineer, manager and designer should read this. Maybe every human. I think of this book every time I try to pull a push door, every time I reach the bottom floor of a stairwell and notice the design that might save my life one day, and every time I try to struggle to operate a television or a microwave. 2) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini This book helped me understand myself and everyone else. For example, I now understand why…
The alternative I've seen to this is to ask the user which way they want it during the setup process. Light vs Dark mode is an example of this. The net result of this user choice is a longer, more complex, and burdensome onboarding process that is rife with decision fatigue. Once the user has chosen, if they don't like their choice, they may not know how to change it, since that initial action was outside of any standard interface. The other issue with settings for everything is that the settings become bloated. In OS X, and to some extent iOS, I knew where all the settings were for the most…
I've used The Design of Everyday Things in many classes I teach. I would agree that it's not practical, but that's not its goal. Instead, it gives you frameworks for thinking about things as well as vocabulary for talking about those things. Off the top of my head, some of the key ideas include: * Affordances, that objects should have (often visual) cues that give hints as to how to use things * Mental models, that every design has three different models, namely system implementation, design model, and user model, and that the design model and user model should try to match each other *…
I was gifted this book my a CIO when in college. She had a dozen copies in her office to hand out to various people. It took me a few tries to get up the will to actually read it. It was years ago, so I don’t remember a lot of details. My main take away was to make controls logical for the thing being controlled. “Norman doors” are the big one, but I often think about it while I’m in my car trying to do something on a touch screen, when all I want is a knob, button, or switch. In the modern era of web design I think it would point to these websites (like most of Apple’s product pages), that…
Absolutely! I once hired a MSc CS grad on a project and he produced some of the worst code I've ever seen, not even just a code perspective, which to some degree is understandable, but from a conceptual point of view as well. Some seriously bad stuff. That said I still greatly value a CS degree (even a self-study one) simply because of the fundamentals it teaches. It's not an automatic indicator of ability, but having that level of understanding makes the difference between someone that can think conceptually about and around a problem and someone that has a set number of tools to solve…
“The Design of Everyday Things”. The book that sparked a change in my career (to be honest) In programming, the analogous problem is API design: taking whatever data structures are used by a software tool internally, and figuring out how to present them to external programmers in a useful, intelligible way. If there’s a mismatch between the internal structure of the system and the structure of what-users-want, then it’s the API designer’s job to translate. A “good” API is one which handles the translation well. User interface design is a more general version of the same problem: take…
Having been a design professional, my best advice: 1. Nobody gives a shit what you like. The personal preferences of the designer are the least useful driver of design. This isn't to discount the designer's aesthetic judgement, but good design comes from applying that judgement to the appropriate context. 2. If you look at something successful and think it's shit, the most likely reason is you don't understand it. Jira sucks? How many weeks have you spent here? https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/guides And yes, weeks because Jira is a tool of your trade and you should be an expert.…
My own humble suggestions - although the books are hardly forgotten. But I think people focus a lot on technical / engineering books, and very little on design / user experience / human behavior, which arguably contribute much more to the overall impressions end users have of programmers' work. First, the greatest book of all time, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - an amazingly introspective and insightful look into how to live an examined life and improve oneself. And then if you want to learn lower-case "design thinking", my top 10 books * Design for Everyday Things - duh. I…