A foundations reading list for Product Designers

Product Design reading.md

Some readings for grounding yourself in product design practice.

The foundations

• Design is a Job, Mike Montiero (short book); mindset of a designer as a skilled advisor and maker.

• About Face 4th edition or newer, Alan Cooper; solid overview of the interaction design discipline's conventional wisdom.

• Just Enough Research, Erika Hall (short book); What are we doing when we talk to users?

• One-Minute Designer, Roger Parker (short book). A compact, old school introduction to visual/print design concepts. Learn yer vocab.

• Everyday Information Architecture, Karen McGrane. A 2019 guidebook to a long running discipline.

• Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps (first 40 pages), Nicole Fosgren, summary of a big empirical research on how lean releases, devops, pipelines, TDD, user centered design outperform traditional orgs

• Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams, Jeff Gothelf

Methodology references

Read 100% of these cards, then refer to them later when planning projects...

• The 18F Methods deck
• The Mozilla methods deck

What effective orgs wish people knew...

• MailChimp Content Style Guide (best in class rules for writing online)
• Microsoft Fluid motion principals (good guidance on how to use motion in UX)
• WC3 Accessibility Principals
• Quickstart list for accessible design

Snack sized reads

• A history of HTML https://alistapart.com/article/a-brief-history-of-markup/
• Personality in design https://alistapart.com/article/personality-in-design/
• How we read https://alistapart.com/article/how-we-read/
• On page load times https://alistapart.com/article/planning-for-performance/
• How we hold gadgets https://alistapart.com/article/how-we-hold-our-gadgets/
• Read the rest of the free chapters on A Book Apart

Emerging topics

• Design Systems intro, https://gist.github.com/Jonathan-Eyler-Werve/8628e890090c56acf358c74bb0a934b6

Whatever seems relevant in A Book Apart: https://abookapart.com/collections.

Such as:

• https://abookapart.com/products/the-new-css-layout
• https://abookapart.com/products/writing-for-designers

The long list

The big list of good UX books: https://medium.com/interactive-mind/the-only-ux-reading-list-ever-d420edb3f4ff

This link is pretty solid, but not up to the minute. Book Apart stays current.