Library / Professional
UI/UX and interaction design
Affordances, research method, and the craft of making a system legible to the person using it.
Why this shelf
A national platform is a room too. The same question applies — what does its structure make easy, and who does that leave out?
- The Design of Everyday ThingsBest door in
Book
The Design of Everyday Things — Donald A. Norman, 1988
Affordances, signifiers, and the insight that blaming the user is almost always a design failure in disguise. Still the first thing I would hand anyone.
Book
About Face — Alan Cooper, 1995
Goal-directed design, and the observation that software built without a model of the user ends up modelling the engineering instead.
Book
Don't Make Me Think — Steve Krug, 2000
Short, and right about almost everything. Its case for cheap, frequent testing over occasional expensive testing is the one I quote most.
Book
Interaction Design — Yvonne Rogers, Helen Sharp & Jenny Preece, 2002
The textbook, and a genuinely good one. Where I go when I need the underlying theory rather than a practitioner’s shortcut.
Book
Designing Interactions — Bill Moggridge, 2006
Interviews with the people who made the things. It teaches judgement by example, which is the only way judgement really transmits.
Book
Universal Methods of Design — Bruce Hanington & Bella Martin, 2012
100 methods, one page each, with the conditions under which each is appropriate. The conditions are the useful part.
Book
Just Enough Research — Erika Hall, 2013
The antidote to research theatre. Brisk about what you actually need to find out and when you should stop.
Book
Laws of UX — Jon Yablonski, 2020
The psychological principles behind interface conventions, each traced to its source. Useful for explaining a decision to people who did not make it.
Rules
How this shelf is kept
- Nothing is here because it is famous. Several famous things are deliberately absent.
- Every entry carries one line in my own words on why it matters. No publisher blurbs.
- Every shelf names its best door in for a newcomer.
- Anything superseded is removed, not archived.
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