Recommendations

Hope the lists below will be useful for you.

on (ui/ux)design & research:

  • Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability | by Steve Krug
  • Atomic Design | by Brad Frost
  • Refactoring UI | by Adam Wathan, Steve Schoger
  • UX Collective
  • Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems | by Steve Krug
  • The business value of design | McKinsey Quarterly
  • Service Design: From Insight to Implementation | by Andy Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie, Ben Reason
  • The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide |by Leah Buley
  • Universal Methods of Design: 100 Ways to Research Complex Problems, Develop Innovative Ideas, and Design Effective Solutions | by Bella Martin (Goodreads Author), Bruce M. Hanington
  • Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights | by Steve Portigal
  • How to Do Things with Words | by J.L. Austin

on games & gamification:

  • Anything by the Gamification Group
  • The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses | by Jesse Schell
  • Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World | by Jane McGonigal
  • Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture | by Johan Huizinga
  • The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia |by Bernard Suits
  • Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience | by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
  • Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards | by Yu-kai Chou
  • Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals | by Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman
  • Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness | by Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein
  • Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture | by David Kushner

Graphic design:

  • Non-Designer’s Design Book
  • Graphic Design Thinking: Beyond Brainstorming (Ellen Lupton)
  • Type Matters! (Jim Williams)
  • Designing with Type
  • Thinking with Type (Ellen Lupton)
  • The Elements of Typographic Style (Robert Bringhurst)
  • Making and Breaking the Grid (Timothy Samara)
  • Layout Essentials: 100 Design Principles for Using Grids
  • Steal Like an Artist
  • Show Your Work!

Interaction Design & Cognitive Psychology:

  • User Friendly (Cliff Kuang with Robert Fabricant)
  • Bottlenecks: Aligning UX Design with User Psychology
  • Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction
  • Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
  • Designing with the Mind in Mind: Simple Guide to Understanding
  • User Interface Design Guidelines
  • Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
  • Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

UX Design:

  • Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
  • Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks
  • Universal Principles of Design
  • A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making
  • Practical Web Analytics for User Experience: How Analytics Can Help You Understand Your Users
  • How to Make Sense of Any Mess: Information Architecture for Everybody
  • The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond

UX Research:

  • Design for How People Think: Using Brain Science to Build Better Products
  • Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience
  • Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights
  • Quantifying the User Experience: Practical Statistics for User Research
  • Think Like a UX Researcher: How to Observe Users, Influence Design, and Shape Business Strategy
  • Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests
  • Eye Tracking the User Experience: A Practical Guide to Research
  • Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research
  • Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories
  • It’s Our Research: Getting Stakeholder Buy-in for User Experience Research Projects
  • Make Your Customers Dance: The Key To User Experience Is Knowing Your Audience
  • Building User Research Teams: How to create UX research teams that deliver impactful insights
  • Analyzing and Interpreting Qualitative Research: After the Interview
  • Delta CX: The Truth About How Valuing Customer Experience Can Transform Your Business

Please let me know if something seems to be missing from that list