The Essential UX and CX Reading List

After doing experience design for many years, I believe that the combination of design thinking and business acumen combine to create the potential for creating great experiences.

Experience professionals need to be proficient designers. Design is a skill that is learned with practice. Reading about it will only get you so far. But, it can give you a good start toward being able to create great experiences for people. This list is intended to provide a place to start toward developing the design and business skills needed to be effective as an experience professional. From there, you will need to practice, working as part of a team to create great experiences, products and services and over time you can become skilled at delivering things that work well for your customers and users.

So what does it take to deliver great experiences? The core activities are:

• Identify the customer and their needs
• Translate needs into a business strategy
• Identify and design the experience touch points
• Be an expert on at least one type of interaction
• Collaborate with others
• Communicate the design
• Measure and improve the experience
• Support the process with business basics

For each of these areas, I explain the importance to an experience professional and then recommend a few key books. While it may take time to work your way through the list, it is worth the investment.

Identify the Customer and Their Needs

Identify the Customer and Their Needs. There are many ways to create requirements. For a good experience, many of the requirements should be generated by observing and interacting with the people who will likely buy or use what you are creating. After learning about your potential users and customers, you will need a way to share information about them with others. Some of the best books on this topic are:

User and Task Analysis for Interface Design by Joanne Hackos and Ginny Redish

Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holzblatt

The User is Always Right: A Practical Guide for Creating and Using Personas for the Web by Steve Mulder and Ziv Yaar

The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design by John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin

Translate Needs Into a Business Strategy

After you understand the people you hope to serve, you need to create a business plan that enables products and services to be created. It takes more than a great design to deliver an experience, someone has to build it. Ensuring you have the right business strategy is key.

There are many types of business strategy. Some business can compete on price or feature set. Not every business should create experiences but it can be a great way to differentiate yourself. Find inspiration from examples of successful companies that have used experience design to engage their customers. It helps to be able to define your strategy, identifying the most important touch points and be able to communicate that strategy to the team. Keep in mind how your approach might change as new technologies and trends impact the way you engage with your customers. Some of the best books I have found on defining business strategy for experience are:

The Experience Economy: Work is Theater and Every Business is a Stage by Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore

Re-Imagine: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age by Tom Peters

Blue Ocean Strategy by Renee Kim and W. C. Mauborgne

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changes, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur

The Amazement Revolution: Seven Customer Service Strategies to Create an Amazing Customer (and Employee) Experience by Shep Hyken

The Now Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter and More Social by Jay Baer and Amber Naslund

Brand Harmony: Achieving Dynamic Results by Orchestrating Your Customers’ Total Experience by Steve Yastrow

Identify and Design the Experience Touch Points

To deliver a whole experience may require specialized designers for each touch point. Working together, they can create an end to end environment that supports people through the activity. There are some core skills for all designers, like sketching, and some skills that are specialized for a touch point, like designing for  mobile devices or voice response units. You should be proficient at the core of design thinking and at least one specific type of interaction design.

Designing for Interaction: Creating Innovative Applications and Devices by Dan Saffer

Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design by Bill Buxton

Be An Expert on at Least One Type of Interaction

There are many types of interactions that can make up an experience. I don’t list them all, but here is a sample of resources that I have found helpful.

Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps by Josh Clark

Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski

This is Service Design Thinking: Basics, Tools, Cases by Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider

Apple OS X Human Interface Guidelines

Microsoft Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines

Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson

Search Patterns: Design for Discovery by Peter Morville

Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone

Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service by Ted Kinni

Collaborate With Others

Great experiences are usually the work of a great team. One of the best examples of teamwork is improvisational comedy. In improv, the players learn key skills like ‘Yes, and…’ to build on each others ideas. Practicing Improv can make a team’s collaboration and creativity much better. There are other ways to think about projects in more creative ways. It isn’t just a matter of completing deliverables on time. It is about tapping into the skills and energy of the team to design and build great experiences.

Truth in Comedy: The Manual of Improvisation by Charna Halpern

Project 50: Fifty Ways to Transform Every “Task” Into a Project That Matters! by Tom Peters

Communicate with Others

The ability to communicate your design to others is a key skill. You will be frequently communicating designs to many people on the project team. Sometimes that means drawing at a white board. Other times it means creating design specifications. Today, it often means working with others via online meeting tools. One of the best skills for a designer is being able to tell the story of what the intended experience will be like. Another useful skill is to be able to create prototypes that help others visualize the experience. Being able to create a business pitch is also very helpful. Here are a few suggestions to get started.

Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam

Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte

The Art of the Start: The Time Tested, Battle Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything  by Guy Kawasaki

Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning by Dan Brown

Storytelling for User Experience: Crafting Stories for Better Design by Quesenbury and Brooks

Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces by Carolyn Snyder

Prototyping: A Pracitioner’s Guide by Todd Zaki Warfel

Measure and Improve the Experience

A key part of experience design is continuous improvement. Products are usability tested. Information is gathered from current customers. Measurement provides the opportunity to improve interactions. There are a variety of useful experience metrics including Usability Data, Web Analytics and the NetPromoter Score.

Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests by Jeffrey Rubin

Remote Research: Real Users, Real Time, Real Research by Nate Bolt

Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics by Tom Tullis

Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity by Avinash Kaushik

The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth by Fred Reichheld

Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action by Jeanne Bliss

Support the Process with Business Basics

You might wonder why that is important for a designer – you are creative and you just want to deliver cools products and experiences. But, in order to actually get those things produced, there must be a business value in creating them – they solve a need for a person that person is willing to pay for.

You need basic business and management skills. One of the best ways to understand these skills is to pick a business series that includes topics like accounting, finance, marketing, and project management  There are several publishers that provide that type of information in an accessible way. I have used the McGraw-Hill series and been pretty happy with it.

 The McGraw-Hill 36 Hour Course in Finance by Robert A. Cooke

The McGraw-Hill 36 Hour Accounting Course by Robert Dixon

The McGraw-Hill 36 Hour Marketing Course by Jefrey L. Seglin

The McGraw-Hill 36 Hour Project Management Course by Helen Cooke

Your Feedback is Welcomed

I hope this list is helpful to you as you consider ways to build great experiences for your users and customers. I would love your feedback. Did I miss a skill? Is there a resource you would recommend? Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

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