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UI/UX Design

11 books
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The Essentials of Interaction Design
by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin and Christopher Noessel

About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, Fourth Edition is the latest update to the book that shaped and evolved the landscape of interaction design. This comprehensive guide takes the worldwide shift to smartphones and tablets into account. New information includes discussions on mobile apps, touch interfaces, screen size considerations, and more. The new full-color interior and unique layout better illustrate modern design concepts.

The interaction design profession is blooming with the success of design-intensive companies, priming customers to expect "design" as a critical ingredient of marketplace success. Consumers have little tolerance for websites, apps, and devices that don't live up to their expectations, and the responding shift in business philosophy has become widespread. About Face is the book that brought interaction design out of the research labs and into the everyday lexicon, and the updated Fourth Edition continues to lead the way with ideas and methods relevant to today's design practitioners and developers.

Updated information includes:

  • Contemporary interface, interaction, and product design methods
  • Design for mobile platforms and consumer electronics
  • State-of-the-art interface recommendations and up-to-date examples
  • Updated Goal-Directed Design methodology

Designers and developers looking to remain relevant through the current shift in consumer technology habits will find About Face to be a comprehensive, essential resource.

by Stephanie Stimac

Solve common application design and usability issues with flair! These essential design and UX techniques will help you create good user experiences, iterate smoothly on frontend features, and collaborate effectively with designer colleagues.

In Design for Developers you will learn how to:

  • Use color, typography, and layout to create hierarchy on a web page
  • Apply color palettes consistently in a user interface
  • Choose the correct typefaces and fonts
  • Conduct user research to validate design decisions
  • Quickly plan a website’s layout and structure

In Design for Developers, author Stephanie Stimac shares the unique insights she’s learned as a designer on the Microsoft Developer Experiences team. This one-of-a-kind book provides a developer-centric approach to the essential design fundamentals of modern web applications. You’ll learn how to craft a polished visual design with just color, space, and typeface, and put all your new skills into practice to design a website from scratch.

Patterns for Effective Interaction Design
by Jenifer Tidwell, Charles Brewer and Aynne Valencia

Designing good application interfaces isn’t easy now that companies need to create compelling, seamless user experiences across an exploding number of channels, screens, and contexts. In this updated third edition, you’ll learn how to navigate through the maze of design options. By capturing UI best practices as design patterns, this best-selling book provides solutions to common design problems.

You’ll learn patterns for mobile apps, web applications, and desktop software. Each pattern contains full-color examples and practical design advice you can apply immediately. Experienced designers can use this guide as an idea sourcebook, and novices will find a road map to the world of interface and interaction design.

  • Understand your users before you start designing
  • Build your software’s structure so it makes sense to users
  • Design components to help users complete tasks on any device
  • Learn how to promote wayfinding in your software
  • Place elements to guide users to information and functions
  • Learn how visual design can make or break product usability
  • Display complex data with artful visualizations
by Jakob Nielsen

Users experience the usability of a web site before they have committed to using it and before making any purchase decisions. The web is the ultimate environment for empowerment, and he or she who clicks the mouse decides everything. Designing Web Usability is the definitive guide to usability from Jakob Nielsen, the world's leading authority. Over 250,000 Internet professionals around the world have turned to this landmark book, in which Nielsen shares the full weight of his wisdom and experience. From content and page design to designing for ease of navigation and users with disabilities, he delivers complete direction on how to connect with any web user, in any situation. Nielsen has arrived at a series of principles that work in support of his findings:

  1. That web users want to find what they're after quickly;
  2. If they don't know what they're after, they nevertheless want to browse quickly and access information they come across in a logical manner.

This book is a must-have for anyone who thinks seriously about the web.

A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
by Steve Krug

Hundreds of thousands of Web designers and developers have relied on web usability expert Steve Krug's guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design. Witty, commonsensical, and eminently practical, it's one of the best-loved and most recommended books on the subject.

  • Fresh perspectives and examples
  • New chapter on mobile usability
  • Still short, profusely illustrated...and best of all-fun to read.

If you've read it before, you'll rediscover what made Don't Make Me Think so essential to Web designers and developers around the world. If you've never read it, you'll see why so many people have said it should be required reading for anyone working on websites.

"After reading it over a couple of hours and putting its ideas to work for the past five years, I can say it has done more to improve my abilities as a Web designer than any other book." -Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing with Web Standards

Design Fundamentals and Shortcuts for Non-Designers
by Tracy Osborn

Hello Web Design teaches design principles, handy shortcuts, and quick solutions to common problems, so you can learn the fundamentals of design and get ahead in your career.

Using real-world examples and fun, beginner-friendly language, Hello Web Design offers everything you need to feel comfortable creating landing pages, presentation slides, online portfolios, and more, all in a beautiful package. From color theory and typography to the end user's experience, designer and developer Tracy Osborn gives you the tools and shortcuts you need to get started with web design—right now.

Beyond human-computer interaction
by Yvonne Rogers, Helen Sharp and Jenny Preece

A revision of the #1 text in the Human Computer Interaction field, Interaction Design, the third edition is an ideal resource for learning the interdisciplinary skills needed for interaction design, human-computer interaction, information design, web design and ubiquitous computing.

The authors are acknowledged leaders and educators in their field, with a strong global reputation. They bring depth of scope to the subject in this new edition, encompassing the latest technologies and devices including social networking, Web 2.0 and mobile devices. The third edition also adds, develops and updates cases, examples and questions to bring the book in line with the latest in Human Computer Interaction.

Interaction Design offers a cross-disciplinary, practical and process-oriented approach to Human Computer Interaction, showing not just what principles ought to apply to Interaction Design, but crucially how they can be applied. The book focuses on how to design interactive products that enhance and extend the way people communicate, interact and work. Motivating examples are included to illustrate both technical, but also social and ethical issues, making the book approachable and adaptable for both Computer Science and non-Computer Science users. Interviews with key HCI luminaries are included and provide an insight into current and future trends.

Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services
by Jon Yablonski

An understanding of psychology-specifically the psychology behind how users behave and interact with digital interfaces-is perhaps the single most valuable nondesign skill a designer can have. The most elegant design can fail if it forces users to conform to the design instead of working within the "blueprint" of how humans perceive and process the world around them.

This practical guide explains how you can apply key principles of psychology to build products and experiences that are more human-centered and intuitive. Author Jon Yablonski deconstructs familiar apps and experiences to provide clear examples of how UX designers can build interfaces that adapt to how users perceive and process digital interfaces.

You'll learn:

  • How aesthetically pleasing design creates positive responses
  • The principles of psychology most useful for designers
  • How these psychology principles relate to UX heuristics
  • Predictive models including Fitts's law, Jakob's law, and Hick's law
  • Ethical implications of using psychology in design
  • A practical framework for applying principles of psychology in your design process

This updated edition includes an even deeper connection to the underlying psychological concepts that govern the principles explored in the book, along with accompanying UX methods and techniques. Examples have been updated to ensure the deconstructed apps and experiences remain familiar and relevant.

by Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger

Make your ideas look awesome, without relying on a designer. Learn how to design beautiful user interfaces by yourself using specific tactics explained from a developer's point-of-view.

Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
by Alan Cooper

Imagine, at a terrifyingly aggressive rate, everything you regularly use is being equipped with computer technology. Think about your phone, cameras, cars-everything-being automated and programmed by people who in their rush to accept the many benefits of the silicon chip, have abdicated their responsibility to make these products easy to use. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum argues that the business executives who make the decisions to develop these products are not the ones in control of the technology used to create them. Insightful and entertaining, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum uses the author's experiences in corporate America to illustrate how talented people continuously design bad software-based products and why we need technology to work the way average people think. Somewhere out there is a happy medium that makes these types of products both user and bottom-line friendly; this book discusses why we need to quickly find that medium.

Mobile-first UX for developers and other accidental designers
by Matt Lacey

Usability Matters: Mobile-first UX for developers and other accidental designers gives you practical advice and guidance on how to create attractive, elegant, and useful user interfaces for native and web-based mobile apps.