5 Books for Product Designers
Since I was young, I enjoyed losing myself in books. Books are a portal into an author’s mind, thought processes, and world view. As I became further interested in design, I scoured the internet for books to help me grow technically, philosophically, and professionally. There are are so many books out there, so this list is my attempt to help designers of all backgrounds to sharpen their design and career tools. If you have other suggestions, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments! Let’s get to it:
1
Hooked
Hooked is the first book I ever read about Product Design. It was my “aha” moment in learning how to design digital products. This book expands on many design concepts such as user time investment during onboarding, the implications of techniques like infinite scroll, triggers and notifications, and so much more. This book has the power to change the designer’s mindset of building products. It is usually on the top of my list of recommendations.
2
Lean UX
Lean UX is a great book to build fundamental understandings of how product design and user experience fits in product development and management processes. In this book, Gothelf and Seiden discuss best practices for creating a visions for a product, interacting with stakeholders, understanding user needs, and how to optimize collaboration within your team. This book helped me create design processes unique to each company I worked for, as each organization does design a little bit differently. This book is fundamental and offers many perspectives for the aspiring lead designer.
3
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward. R. Tufte is a fantastic book for the aspiring data-visualization designer. In organizations, data visualization is typically under the Business Analyst, Data Science, or Statistics arm, though I believe designers deserve a seat at this table. This book describes some of history’s most interesting and informative data visualizations. It is full of principles and best practices of visualizations, and it also contains hundreds of examples of graphs, charts, and visualizations. This book satisfies my inner historian with all its examples. Read this book if you want to learn about all the creative ways a designer can display complex information.
4
Creativity, Inc.
This book by Pixar Founder Ed Catmull tells the history of the world’s first computer-generated imagery (CGI) computer and the story of Pixar’s founding. The story is just downright cool and inspiring for those interested in starting their own company. The book is mostly set in Silicon Valley, and you get a real feel of what it was like during the beginning of the tech boom in the San Francisco Bay Area, even getting an inside view of Steve Jobs' involvement in Pixar’s founding. It’s a fun story for those interesting in entrepreneurship, technology, and Disney/Pixar.
5
Microinteractions: Designing with Details
Dan Saffer’s “Microinteractions: Designing with Details” discusses the smallest details in user-experience and user-interface design. It’s a great book for those wanting to understand how and when to use certain interface elements during a particular user experiences. Saffer describes a Microinteraction as a “contained product moment that revolves around a single use case—a tiny piece of functionality that only does one thing.” Thus, as product designers, it is our job to design for specific moments. It is therefore important for us to understand best practices for these small interactions. The book also discusses moments in experiences which trigger a person’s desire for an interaction, how to provide feedback for after an interaction is performed, and much more. I highly recommend you add this book as a staple to your product design library.
So that’s it! There are many other books I could suggest, though these books are the books that influenced my approach to product design. These are great reads for both new and experienced designers.
I’m always on the look out for new books and approaches, and would love to hear your thoughts on other books I should look into. Please share and feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or want to discuss Product Design, User Experience, or anything else Design.