A colleague asked me for some reading tips, here are a few books I recommend for people who have an interest in user experience. Nothing bleeding-edge, but solid references with plenty of relevance for today’s UX work.
Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, by Steve Krug
Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-it-yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems, Steve Krug’s new book
Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, Jakob Nielsen’s seminal book (still valid, all these years later).
Prioritizing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger
The Design of Everyday Things, by Nielsen’s associate Don Norman.
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works
Content Strategy for the Web, by Kristina Halvorson
Elements of User Experience: User-centered Design for the Web, by Adaptive Path founder Jesse James Garrett
Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World, by Adaptive Path‘s Todd Wilkens, David Verba, Peter Merholz, and Brandon Schauer.
A good novel would help, too. I recommend Marguerite Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Natsume Soseki’s I am a Cat, and John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
A merry holiday, y’all!