Good books on "designing for improving the User Experience"

Question

I'm trying to learn some programming designing guidelines on User Experience in both web and desktop applications. I've read some online resources like ux_matters. I'd like to get some books on the subject but I can't find the one that fits me best. Any suggestion is highly appreciated!

Answer 1

"Don't make me think" by Steven Krug is a short and REALLY good read. "About Face 3: The essentials of interaction design" by Cooper, Reimann & Cronin is highly recommended as well.

Answer 2

I am not convinced you can program for user experience, but you can design for it.

Some good books are

• Steve Krug's "don't make me think"
• Jeff Johnson's "GUI Bloopers 2.0"
• Jakob Nielson's Web Usability design book 1 and 2
• Bruce's Ask Tog
• And maybe Alan Cooper's "About face"

I also liked Don Norman's "The design of everyday things" for a great general design introduction (affordances, etc.), but may not be what you're after.

Answer 3

Mark Miller on the Science of Good UI on dotnetrocks

Answer 4

Try Designing Interfaces by Jennifer Tidwell. It's organized around patterns, just like the other famous patterns book, which name I just forgot.

Answer 5

"User Interface Design for Programmers" by Joel Spolsky

(I think joel has posted most of the chapters online)

(can someone with rep, compile all the good books into the top answer)

Answer 6

You can't program for user-experience. You need to develop your application through several iterations evaluating against user-experience goals such as helpful, fun, enjoyable, aesthetically pleasing, rewarding or supportive.

Remember that user-experience is different to usability. Its not questions like "Is it easy to do task X?", but questions like "Is it enjoyable to do task Y?". Its very difficult to assign metrics to review this performance, so you have to evaluate with people. You can't code in 'good looking' or 'helpful', and you can't read a book on how to.

The book I would recommend if you're interested in any element of interaction design, be it HCI, Usability or user experience is Interaction Design by Rogers, Preece et al.

Answer 7

The Design of Everyday Things is a book that talks about UX in a more generalized fashion. A very applicable read.

Answer 8

I've read most of the books suggested so far and they are all useful. I would add Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell. This book helped me out when I created some UI design guidelines- in fact the book itself is in the form of documented patterns. It should be very useful for creating guidelines.

Here's an example- Responsive Enabling. It's my favourite pattern for guiding a user though a complex, multistep task.

If you team do a lot of visualisation stuff, I would recommend Edward Tufte's book The Visual Display of Quantitative Data.

Answer 9

I've made a compilation with every death-tree-book that has more than one upvote. I've also included some missing links. In no particular order:

• "About Face 3: The essentials of interaction design" by Cooper, Reimann & Cronin
• "Don't make me think" by Steve Krug
• "GUI Bloopers 2.0" by Jeff Johnson
• "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald A. Norman
• "The Humane Interface" by Jef Raskin
• "Designing Web Usability" by Jakob Nielsen
• "Designing the Obvious" by Robert Hoekman Jr

The remaining books are well worth a compilation:

• Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data by Stephen Few
• Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski
• Interaction Design by Rogers, Preece et al.
• Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Data by Edward Tufte's
• User Interface Design for Programmers by Joel Spolsky