Should Designers read? The answer from me is a big capital, YES.

However, why do some designers often consider reading a waste of time? Well, time is a finite resource, and many students and new professionals, find their time better spent on design tools, side projects, or even networking.

I agree, in many situations these are a great use of time, (check out my featured article on UX planet here to learn more) but that is not the reason why many mentors are not advocating the importance of reading.

The reason why you don't hear more seasoned professionals sharing this with you is that they haven't even cracked the secret to reading as a designer.

So here is the big secret, the influx of information on the internet is easily digestible but often shallow.

To succeed you should read more scholarly articles.

Even I only recently understood how reading academic articles can drastically improve a designer’s ability after completing a critical reading course from our University of Washington Human-Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) program

In this article, I will share with you exactly how to read, what to read, and how to leverage topics you learned from your reading to not only sound smart in your next design circle chat, but to even impress your next hiring manager at your future interview.

Here are my three main takeaways.

1.Don’t worry about keeping up-to-date.

I know our design field always feels like an influx of new themes, new tech, and new trends. Reading and writing a critical analysis on old design academic writing seems to be dumb and outdated. Time seems to be even better spent reading a medium article like this on the internet, well that is not always the case.

After reading countless academic papers from the era of 1960s-2020. I’ve come full circle to realize the themes and topics widely popular today such as VR, Machine learning, Privacy, or even Virtual Collaboration have all been topics researchers tackled for decades.

Trying to stay the most “current” by reading the newest articles might end up feeling like a burden and an impossible goal to reach. This is why I recommended readers to not worry about how up-to-date the article is, but focus on how relatable the topic is to your intrest. In fact, reading articles from decades ago can be very interesting for you to see what predictions by academics have come to be, and which ones have not. For example, the ubiquitous technology vision has been widely accepted as our primary direction for HCI in recent years, while tangible computing has not. Understanding history is a great first step to predicting the future. Reading academic papers on both these topics will give you insight into how HCI might continue to evolve in the coming years.

2.Read topics, not just articles.

From my recent HCDE course, I realized once you find a topic related to your current field of work or even just of interest to you, you should try to read the same topic from different perspectives.

Through focusing on topics, you can have the ability to go more in-depth on particular areas of HCI and learn more than surface-level information. However, just remember unless you plan to be a researcher in a certain HCI field, as a UX designer or UX writer, it's normal and good to keep your interests dynamic and allow the topics to flow into one another. There are dozens of popular themes and topics in the HCI world that continue to stay in the spotlight. It may not be possible to ever read and study these topics in-depth in a lifetime. Therefore when reading, we should be mindful of finding overlaps between topics of research and subjects we previously read. Finding the right balance between diving deep into topics and making sure your interests are not static, is a great way for entry-level professionals and students to stay eager and curious in their early careers.

3.Read, analyze, reflect and connect to the industry.

By far one of the most important strategic techniques I’ve learned to read scholarly articles effectively, is to be critical when reading. A great way to do this is try making connections from your reading to your work in the UX field.

Although applying concepts you are currently reading about immediately into projects or work might be unrealistic at times. For example, you might have just read a few papers on data privacy and misinformation. These topics may not directly relate to your immediate project, but it will be very helpful for you to take the themes and topics from the reading and draw relevance to current events.

To do this, I use a technique I learned from my HCDE class called a “show and tell” style analysis. This “show and tell” lets me find another article from the news or another product in the industry that relates to the themes and topics I just read. I will then make a connection somehow. After making the connection I will imagine what would I share about this topic and problem space if I was presenting it, or “showing it” to someone, how can I make it sound impactful and interesting.

By making these connections right after reading, not only will you understand the topic much better, you also start to see that nothing is entirely new and there are frameworks for making sense of just about everything. Seeing how everything can be interconnected enables you to bring up these themes at future work discussions not only to “seem smart”, but to often make meaningful contributions.

Final thoughts, try it!

Reading may not be something you incorporated into your designer lifestyle, but that's ok, doesn't mean you shouldn't try!

Coming from an interaction design background, our course work was very different from HCDE. We never required much reading. Sure, we read some classics like Design of everyday things, Speculative everything, but most of the reading has been optional work, never main points of discussions in class.

Not to mention I entered the professional design world very early back in 2018 through interning at one of China’s most prestigious design firms the summer of my freshmen year. I have continued working numerous part-time and contract roles while attending University to pay off tuition. So just like many other professionals, once I got so involved with the industry, I occasionally fell into the trap of focusing only on productivity and performance, rather than learning new things.

Which if you read my articles, you know the number one thing I always say is designers should never stop learning.

Sure, it’s important that when you read design articles and books you are not forsaking actual practice. However, as mentioned above in the “show and tell” technique, you can easily use what you’ve learned through reading, and apply it to your own UX writing, design philosophy, mock-up exercise, and design challenges.

If you want a few good articles or topics to start with, My name is Leon and I'm always happy to chat! Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or join our ever-growing design discord.

If you are looking for job opportunities, mentorship, or career advice, we have an active community with hundreds of verified interns, mentors, and professionals from big techs like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. We also highly encourage students to join! In our discord, students come from all sorts of majors across American campuses. (Yes, we also have lots of amazing Bootcamp grads) Everyone is welcome.

So if you want to learn more about design and use some of our resources, feel free to join here!