What are the best books to learn UX/UI design for beginners? Here are my 4 best book recommendations. These are the ones I used myself when I first started learning.
The best way to get started learning UX/UI design is by reading books and articles, taking courses, and doing lots of projects. As well as receiving feedback from senior designers so that you can improve.
The list of best books to learn UX/UI Design
For me, books have been a great resource for learning UX/UI design. Especially in the beginning. I probably bought more than 15 books on digital design in total. A lot of them were helpful, but here are the best ones I read.
- About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper
- The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett
- Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
- The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
These four books, however, have somewhat different focuses. You can read more about each one below with examples of what types of information the books teaches.
1. About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper
This book is a great “handbook” on UX/UI design. It doesn’t fit in one hand though, since it’s a huge course literature book.
But, the book is very easy to read and the information is easily absorbed. I loved reading this book and think it’s great.
It’s also more of a practical book than a theoretical one, which is more fun to learn from. Especially in the beginning. It focuses a lot on the design process and also teaches a lot of terminologies.
In the picture below you can see that the book contains graphical examples of the UX/UI design process, in this case, it’s personas. Personas are used to build empathy with the end-users and to design inclusivly.
The About Face book helped me a lot at the beginning. I used to have it on my desk during the first few months on my job as a UX/UI designer.
I used it for looking up how to do different parts of the design process. This was especially helpful when I was feeling insecure and was lost in what I was doing.
2. The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett
To provide as much value as possible as a designer, you can’t only focus on making pretty mockups. You also need to consider the bigger picture. The finished product needs to meet the goals of both the client and the user.
This book helps with being able to do that. It is also a more practical book (how-to design) than a theoretical one.
I would say that this book is more focused on the entire product design cycle. It doesn’t only talk about the UX/UI design process, but almost the entire product development process.
See the image below for an example of what the book contains.
It talks a lot about the different layers to design, and why a design process is important to cover all aspects.
For example, you can not only do visual design (blue layer) without even thinking about what the site needs to contain for features (green layer).
3. Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
“Don’t Make Me Think”, is probably one of the 3 most popular books for learning UX design. It’s super easy to read and contains many eye-opening guidelines.
See some examples below of UX insights and guidelines that you can find in the book.
4. The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
The legendary UX book by Don Norman. It doesn’t have a lot of practical user interface screenshots or rules. But what it does it that it explains what user experience means in its essence. Both in physical and digital products.
One of his famous examples in the book is about the push-or-pull doors that trick people every single day. Haven’t you also accidentally pushed a door, that was supposed to be pulled? And vice versa?
Hopefully, these books will help you as well with getting started.
- How to place your UI design in a mock-up (Photoshop tutorial)
- Learn UX/UI Design: How to design forms with good UX
Latest UX/UI design trends
One part of being a great designer is also knowing what current graphical trends there are right now. You don’t want to be creating things that look outdated and unprofessional.
- UX/UI Design Trends X4 _ Gleb Kuznetsov
- UI Design Trends X3 _ Voice control, 3D illustrations & face masks
- UI DESIGN INSPIRATION X2 _ CARL HAUSER w/ Futuristic graphics