The starting point:
Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
A mandatory reading for anyone who works in a digital company, covering basic principles that helps you to take the day-to-day design decision.
Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences
The user experience is not limited to the screen, neither is our job. Designing any interaction requires a deep understading of the user behavior online and offline and how to explore the opportunities in all enviroments.
Designing for Interaction: Creating Innovative Applications and Devices
This book offers a fresh look in the interaction design field, with the new challenges of designing the world around us.
The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web
Jesse James Garret explores the basic elements of user experience design for the web in this classic reading.
Smashing UX Design: Foundations for Designing Online User Experiences
The popular website Smashing Magazine has compiled guides and resources for UX designers in a pratical and easy-to-read book.
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
The fundamental concepts of information architecture and how to apply it for complex web systems. The bear on the cover has inspired our site design.
Usability & Interaction Design Books:
Designing Interactions
What makes this book unique is that it puts together 40 brilliant minds in interviews about interaction design.
About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
As the subtitle says, this book has the essentials of interaction design, being a mandatory reading for everyone who works in the field.
Microinteractions: Designing with Details
Dan Saffer explains and illustrates the rules and structure of micro-interactions in this easy-to-read book.
Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design
A great reading for those who are looking for a reference book to refresh the basic interaction design concepts and principles.
Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun, and Effective User Experiences
Understanding the stages of seduction is a key resource to leverage the user experience by exploring the user motivation in interacting with your interface.
Search Patterns: Design for Discovery
Search is a great interaction when it's well done, but the thing is: that is not easy at all. This book explains in depth the search experience and design approaches to it, so you can go beyond a cop out solution.
Books on Methods & Processes:
The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience
A time-tested, process-and-guidelines approach that provides you with actionable methods and techniques while retaining a firm grounding in human-computer interaction concepts and theory.
Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rule-breakers, and Changemakers
Great things don't happen in a vacuum, but in a healthy environment for creative thinking and innovation. This book includes more than 80 games to help you break down barriers and learn about new ways of collaborating with your team.
The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide
Do more with less: a range of approaches that have big impact and take less time and fewer resources than the standard lineup of UX deliverables.
Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience
Lean UX lets you focus on the actual experience being designed, rather than deliverables. In the book you can learn how to rapidly experiment with design ideas, validate them with real users, and continually adjust your design based on what you learn.
Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services
A hands-on guide to designing web sites, software, handhelds, and all other interactive products from start to finish – including creating personas, evolving the visual design, collaborating within and outwith the design team, and understanding potential users and customers.
Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design
The book talks about an interesting process with up-front investment in sketching and ideation to build the notion of informed design: molding emerging technologies into a form that serves our society and reflects its values.
User Research & Strategy Books:
Quantifying the User Experience: Practical Statistics for User Research
One of the biggest challenge for UXers is to use numbers to measure the user experience and set perfomance indicators for the business. This books is a great introduction of the topic of UX designers and product managers.
Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior
Using mental models allows designers to create a tangible and realistic design approach based on the users context, motivations and abilities.
Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights
Interviewing users can be tricky. This book is a great tool for newcomers and seasoned designers to refresh some techniques before planning a user interview.
The User is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web
Creating personas requires methodology and research. This book serves as an easy checklist of what you need to develop when using personas for your product.
Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics
A great reference book to define what the key metrics are for your needs - from site performance to desired user behavior.
Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests
A step-by-step guide for user research and usability testing. A handful resource for those who needs to plan and conduct tests and surveys on the go.
Mobile & Responsive Design Books:
Mobile Usability
The master of usability, Jakob Nielsen, brings his thoughts, strategies and interaction principles to the mobile universe.
Designing Gestural Interfaces: Touchscreens and Interactive Devices
This book serves as an introductory guide for gestural interfaces, showing all the possibilites of mobile and sensorial technology.
Mobile First (A Book Apart #6)
In the sixth book of the "A Book Apart" series, Luke W. sintethizes his blog posts, case studies and thoughts on the mobile firt approach.
Responsive Web Design (A Book Apart #4)
Think beyond the desktop and craft beautiful designs that anticipate and respond to your users’ needs, from all the increasing array of devices and browsers they are accessing your website from.
Mobile Interaction Design
The authors brings the key concepts of usability to the mobile interaction context. With exercises and case studies, this books is a great tool for students and new designers.
Designing the Mobile User Experience
A broader vision about mobile design and development makes this book a good read even with the fast pace of new mobile technologies.
UX-Related Business Books:
Business Model Generation
The book features a template that helps explain the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context.
Building Design Strategy
Top-name contributors share their experience and insights on how design can be used to solve business problems. Topics explore the full range of issues today, including adapting to challenges, developing tangible strategies and using design to create fiercely loyal customers.
This is Service Design Thinking
Besides becoming a buzzword these days, "Service Design" reflects an inevitable reality: the boundaries between products and services are blurring and it is time for a different way of thinking. The book introduces service design thinking in a manner accessible to both beginners and experienced design professionals.
The Connected Company
To keep pace with today’s connected customers, your company must deeply engage with workers, partners, and customers to change how work is done, how you measure success, and how performance is rewarded. Connected companies have the advantage, because they learn and move faster than their competitors.
Designing Services with Innovative Methods
Service design is a tool for designing a more sustainable society. Design practioners from several companies share their service design thinking and the benefits of the service design process for both companies and for the public sector. A lot of detailed case studies form different industries.
Intertwingled
Peter Morville reflects about the role of Information Architects in the current world and how the field has become more important than ever. Bringing cases and tales from his successful career as one of our "founding fathers", Morville shows how the complexity of our connected world requires us to think systems, categories, relationships and culture as a whole.
Related Concepts:
The Design of Everyday Things
For anyone who designs anything to be used by humans. The book opens your eyes to the perversity of bad design and the desirability of good design, and raise your expectations about how things should be designed.
In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World
In the Bubble is about a world based less on stuff and more on people. At the heart of In the Bubble is a belief, informed by a wealth of real-world examples, that ethics and responsibility can inform design decisions without impeding social and technical innovation.
100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about People
This book combines real science and research with practical examples to deliver a guide for you to design more intuitive and engaging work for print, websites, applications, and products that matches the way people think, work, and play.
Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
Emotional Design articulates the profound influence of the feelings that objects evoke, from our willingness to spend thousands of dollars on Gucci bags and Rolex watches, to the impact of emotion on the everyday objects of tomorrow.
The Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life
"Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful". MIT professor John Maeda offers ten laws for balancing simplicity and complexity in business, technology, and design--guidelines for needing less and actually getting more.
Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?
Neuro Web Design applies the research on motivation, decision making, and neuroscience to the design of Web sites. You will learn the unconscious reasons for people's actions, how emotions affect decisions, and how to apply the principles of persuasion to design Web sites that encourage users to click.
Want more books?Visit the full list on GoodReads >
If you are not only into books, but also into meeting people who share that same passion, you should check this UX Book Clubs list (filtered by country and region).
This list was created by Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga, and illustrated
by Bruno Oyama. This is a personal list and has no intention to be exhaustive in any sense. The bear that appears on the drawings is a reference to the polar bear book - one of the most remarkable pieces in the recent Information Architecture literature.
We hope you find it helpful.