You’re a professional designer and I “like” The Design of Everyday Things as a layperson (it makes sense!) but it’s clearly been bad for software design, leading to all kinds of terrible things (sekumorphism!) while providing a useful critique towards it (flat design! The fucking hamburger menu!)
What’s a good modern book on UX design?
Thank you for your question!
I'm afraid you have pegged slightly wrong, but that's alright. I'm actually a professional programmer, I only dabble in design. (The difference is that the former pays my mortgage while the latter is merely a hobby.) I've been thinking about how to best answer you for the past few days, and I have a few pointers, from most to least annoying.
My most annoying answer is that I used to have a mentor in UX design who is absolutely brilliant at what she does. If she ever writes a book, I would recommend it in a heartbeat. But alas, that knowledge is locked away for now. Obviously, this doesn't help you one bit.
My second most annoying answer is that UX design is essentially "applied empathy." It's a very fuzzy skill to learn as it basically boils down to "pay attention to how people behave." This means you can practice it anywhere, but it's hard to determine if you're becoming stronger as a designer.
My third most annoying answer is that you should devour anything related to good design. For example, Vox has a series on YouTube examining the design of everyday things, and How RVs got their swoops is a good entry point. Why these shapes? What does it signal? And does it matter? I also heartily recommend the podcast 99% invisible for working those same designer muscles.
And finally, my least annoying answer is that I really haven't read many books about UX design. The one book I read is called Communicating the User Experience, and while it gives a good overview of how to create user profiles, over half of the book is about how to create them in PowerPoint. I gave it three stars.
Maybe I can help! I see The Design of Everyday Things get mentioned as a good starter book to understand the theory of UX (or as we used to say years ago, interaction design), but not necessarily the applied parts of design. I'll caveat this by saying this is all for software design. If you'd like more recommendations on game design, let me know.
As a designer, there's several applied skills that are necessary for doing design:
- UX research: You don't have feedback. How are you gonna get feedback?
- sensemaking and goal-setting: You have feedback from the customer, feedback from your boss, and someone tells you to make a thing. How do you choose what thing to make? Should you be making a thing at all?
- information architecture: How will you express this new thing in words? How does it integrate into the pre-existing system (if there is a system)? If not, how do you show what is important to your customers?
- interaction design: Your thing needs to be digital. Ok, how do you express that in digital space through UI and interactions?
- universality and accessibility: People have different needs. How is your design going to be usable by everyone, not just someone that has the same faculties as you?
- communicating design: How will you prototype this to get feedback? How are you going to sell this to your client/the business? How are you going to work with programmers to make this design real?
This isn't an exhaustive list. Digital systems exist within a larger service structure, so understanding customer journey maps and service blueprints will help you understand how the thing you're making fits into the larger service.
Books/articles I'd recommend are:
On UX research
- Just Enough Research by Erika Hall
On sensemaking, goal-setting and information architecture
- How to Sense of Any Mess by Abby Covert
- Outcomes Over Output by Joshua Seiden
On interaction design
- Microinteractions by Dan Saffer
- Laws of UX
On universality and accessibility
On communicating design*
- Presenting Design Work by Denise Jacobs
- Design is a Job by Mike Monteiro
*Note that when it comes to communicating with programmers, agile and scrum is popular in software teams, so it helps to understand the concepts around it. I made a series of posts on Medium about mixed design and scrum teams a few years ago that might help if you're in a scrum team and want to try design practices.
Hope this helps!
The Design of Everyday Things has not been bad for software design, and skeuomorphism, as much as it's associated with Apple's gaudiest visual design phase, is not necessarily terrible.
Affordances in design (making the way something is used obvious from the way it looks) is tremendously important, and even as we've scaled back on the felt and leather era of UI art, we have decidedly rebounded from the era of flat design because that was terrible. And we haven't abstracted away every affordance into minimalist hell because it would be a usability disaster.
We need gradients and drop shadows to show depth and layering and interactivity. We need to understand that something is a tab on a page and there are others behind it, that something is a toggle because it looks like we're flipping a switch, that something is a folder and we are putting documents into it, that we can put a photo into the garbage can and we can fish it back out before it's emptied, that we are looking through a window and as things pass out of our view it doesn't mean they cease to exist, that we are flipping through open apps on our phones like cards we can flick away when they're no longer needed, that we are pulling open a drawer to find the tools stashed within, that a button is a button and not a random icon floating in space.
We can and should create these affordances where they're useful, preferably keeping good taste in mind when opening photoshop.
