Top 5 UX Books for a Desert Island?

Posted by Alan Trow-Poole on July 15, 2014 in UX Design |No Comments

 Your Next UX Mission Should You Decide to Accept…

You are told your next UX Design Project (to design & document a responsive i.e. device agnostic website for a huge retailer)  will be a little different. You are to be marooned on a desert island (with food, shelter, pens & paper etc.). However, there will be no technology or Internet access allowed, but you could take with you 5 UX/design books.

Top 5 UX Books for a Desert Island

 

My Selection

Here are the books I would take and why, (and before you ask, I doubt even if you are Amazon Prime customer they would deliver to this island):

1. Drawing Ideas: A Hand-Drawn Approach for Better Design Authors: Mark Baskinger, William Bardel

   I would choose this book to help with my visual communications and drawing techniques. If the entire design has to be on paper I would want some inspiration and ideas how best to communicate this with pens and pencils. Plus the book is quite heavy (hardback) so could double-up as a drawing board underneath my sheets of paper. It’s also thick enough to be used as seat 🙂

2. The Web Designers Idea Book, Volume 4: Inspiration from the best web design trends, themes and styles [Paperback] Author: Patrick McNeil
   
   As of writing this post volume 4 of this book isn’t available yet. However, any of the previous editions would be fine. Basically I would use this book for inspiration and ideas. It’s amazing what ideas you can get if you have a problem in-mind and just flip through examples of user interfaces and websites especially if they are good enough to be published in a book like this.

3. Mobile Design Pattern Gallery: UI Patterns for Smartphone Apps [Paperback] Author: Theresa Neil

   Mobile user interfaces are evolving so quickly it’s hard to keep up. This is the 2nd edition of this book and filled with a lot more examples and patterns. Like the previous book this would act as a source of inspiration and because it’s mobile specific has a lot more detailed information. The assignment is to design a responsive website so I would probably start looking at mobile patterns first.

4. Universal Principles of Design (Revised & Updated Edition) Authors: William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler

   When you can’t remember how or why a design will or won’t work or like the previous two books you are looking for design inspiration this is a must have reference guide.

5. Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (Voices That Matter) Author: Steve Krug

   This maybe last on my list but I think I would start by reading this book first. I read in the first edition of this book you could read it completely on a long distance flight. I was travelling back from San Francisco, I purchased this book at the airport and before we landed at Heathrow London I had indeed read the entire book. This latest edition has more information on mobile usability so will definitely come in handy for this task.

What 5 UX/Design books would you take?