Resources

6 UX Books Suitable For Beginners & Experienced Designers

As a designer, you’ll probably be aware of the designing principles and will have good knowledge about Adobe Photoshop, Sketch and other necessary tools. You may even possess good experience in web designing. However, it’s important for you to look beyond the commonly practiced designing practices and take your level of web designing to the next level. This is where learning UX comes in handy.

Today, more and more users seek for a good experience when accessing a website – they look for better accessibility, enhanced functionality, easy-on-the-eyes design and more. And thus, learning the art of creating designs that deliver enhanced UX (user experience design) can help give a boost to your career.

While you may find plenty of tutorials providing tips and suggestions on creating designs for improving user experience, they still might not seem enough to learn about the best practices of UX design. However, reading books can help you understand about almost all of the UX designing concepts in a more effective manner.

In this post, I’ll present some of the best UX designs, providing useful information for learning how you can deliver better user experiences through your design:

Smashing UX Design

This isn’t just a simple book on UX design and instead serves as a comprehensive UX reference manual that comes loaded with useful information for mastering User Experience Design (UX). It provides an overview of the UX and lets you check out some of the most common research tools and techniques ideal to be used for creating user centered designs. The authors of the book share their experience about how you can meet client’s expectations of a design. You will find many tips in the form of case-studies, well-structured guides, case studies, checklists, etc.

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A Project Guide to UX Design

The second best option, you can consider for practicing on building successful user experience design is “A Project Guide to UX Design”. It will help you learn about the practice of understanding your users’ needs – that is the way they interact with the design’s UI (user interface). What’s more? The book also provides in-depth understanding of creating mobile interactions, user testing, design principles and much more. The book serves as a great primer to those having a graphic design background, but aren’t trained in delivering user experience design – in the form of a website or app.

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Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

What makes this book different from others is, how it focuses more on discussing about function, rather than form. Simply put, it provides a good understanding of the how you can enhance the usability of your design, which eventually improves the user experience. The best part is that the book includes several examples to demonstrate: how making a few tweaks can enhance the effectiveness of a website. The book basically deals with the real-world web design scenarios, and offers some easy exercises to examine a website’s usability.

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Usable Usability

Are you frustrated working on improving pop-ups? Tired of working on the form that makes you begin the process of form creation if you miss out some fields? In that case, Usable Usability present solutions that can help you fix all such usability issues. The book helps you understand user’s needs, disclose techniques that can be used to exceed user expectations, and provide advice on how you can deliver a better user experience. The book makes you know about the tools that helps in improving the quality of products according to a user’s perspective. What’s more? It offers guidelines and checklists to measure your product and improve it and so on.

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About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design

Web designing industry has evolved – we no longer just design websites, but also need to pay attention to creating interactive displays, and add gestures in websites to optimize them for mobile devices. About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design fourth edition are written for the mobile age. This book takes into account the increasing need for designing for the Smartphones and tablets. As a web designer, you will most likely be working on different UI’s (user interfaces). Reading this book will help you learn about the useful resources and methods that will prove valuable when working on any User Interface Design project.

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Mobile Usability

If you want to learn the right technique for designing only for the small screen devices, the Mobile Usability is one book you shouldn’t miss to read. It’s counted among some of the very few publications that provide content including the pros and cons of different mobile displays. Most importantly, the authors of this book have presented the analysis they’ve performed on different type of application problems, and offer solutions to the problems that helps in improving user experience.

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Conclusion

Do you wish to become a great UX designer? Want to learn all the key aspects and nitty-gritty details of creating excellent user experience designs? Well, then there are some resourceful books on UX design you must read, such as the ones listed above.

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