We’re living in a digital age where more and more of the world’s information is available to us at our fingertips, whether on an e-reader or on an app. One profession that has been revolutionized by the Internet is product design — those people who create, market, and sell products that are used by millions.

Product designers don’t just design objects anymore; they also need to know how people use them. Designers need to worry not only about how a product looks but also what problems it solves and what its usefulness might be in certain scenarios.

Product designers have to be good communicators because they need to pitch their ideas to potential investors and partners, as well as other team members. The following books are some of my favourites that offer a wealth of knowledge for anybody interested in learning how to become a product designer. Particularly if you want to get started with a UX or join a startup and assist them with product design. So I’m going to offer a few books that might be transformational for yourself and are focused on lean UX and a lean approach to product design and development. So here are 11 recommendations for the top books that every designer should read. So let’s get this started.

Book №1

The first book is called Validating Product Ideas Through Lean User Research. It’s a survival guide to finding a perfect intersection between a lean approach to managing waste in the projects, and just enough user insight to craft a delightful product. So I think that just enough is exactly what the focus point of this book is and in real-life scenarios, you’re going to have a limited budget, a limited amount of time, a limited amount of resources human wise, you know, like how many specialists you can bring on a team and just knowing the minimal effective dose on different methods is what this book is about and it’s kind of like a really lean-approach.

Book №2

The next book is called the User Experience Team of one. I think every designer should read it because at some point in your lifetime you’re either aware or you’re going to be the only designer in a project or even in a product team or even in a company. This is kind of like covering all those scenarios of how to handle those situations. It’s a great survival guide actually to handle the design process and dealing with other people who are, for example, not so design savvy. If you want to be a lead designer, this is one of the books which is, I mean, transformative and it’s really inspirational.

Book №3

So the next book is called Lean UX, and it’s probably the best out there on the UX process with little to no waste and a basic premise is to have very short discoveries, ideation and prototyping efforts in order to fail early and manage risk.

Book №4

Lean UX is kind of transverse and is a good segway to the next book, which is called Lean Startup and it’s about producing design and ideation and developing it and testing on the go with every single iteration so that you know that you’re on the right track with your users and with your product so that you can actually manage your risk and make a startup a success.

Book №5

The next book is really similar to Lean Startup and it’s called Sprint and it’s a superb process book with some guys from Google and it’s about how to get from problem to prototype in just five days, it’s like a really clear split. This is a handy book for those who, for example, need the ability to run workshops independently and manage stakeholders, subject matter experts, users and so forth. So it gives you like a really good split of, let’s say, what to do on day 1, day 2, day 3, etc, and you can actually scale that framework into bigger UX processes.

Book №6

This book is called Universal Principles of Design and this is actually filled with hundreds of principles to make better design decisions in general and it’s not just product design or visual design, you know, on a graphical level; it’s actually the architecture of information, human perception of visual means and it’s kind of like how to apply that to creative effort and again, it’s a goldmine for product designers.

Book №7

The next book we have is Universal Methods of Design and it’s another goldmine. It’s basically all the methods you can use while crafting products or designing user experiences and this is kind of like a full of research methods and processes related methodology and it’s kind of like a pick and choose, so it’s up to you to actually choose which tools you need for which problem to solve and I find it like really fascinating because it has over 100 different methods to apply in different situations and descriptions and walkthroughs and, you know, you can just choose whatever is most relevant to your organization basically, or your team or your product.

Book №8

Hooked by Nir Eyal is a great book for product designers who want to understand how psychology affects consumer behaviour and how it can be used to design products that lead people down the path of habit formation. A key concept in the book is the “Hook Model,” which provides a four-step process for building habit-forming products.

Book №9

The Elements of User Experience Design by Jesse James Garrett and Luke Wroblewski is an essential read for all product designers who want to understand the basics of user experience design. The book details the four main elements of UI design: navigability, information architecture, usefulness, and learnability. It also highlights how users learn through the five senses and how they make decisions based on the affordances they perceive in a product.

Book №10

Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value by Thomas Lockwood is an essential book for product designers who want to learn how design thinking can help them with their work. This book will teach you about design thinking and its history, case studies of successful companies that use it to solve problems, and how you can learn the skills needed to become a better designer.

Book №11

Don Norman’s revised version of one of his earlier books is now available, called The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition. This book was published in 2012 and is focused on how design thinking affects everyday things like our smartphones, computers, appliances, cars, aeroplanes — you name it. I consider this one to be a must-read for any product designer who wants to learn how to improve the usability of their designs.

Conclusion

These 11 books will give you a head start on learning how to become a product designer. These are all useful resources that I recommend to anyone who wants to learn more about this exciting profession. So it doesn’t really matter whether it is best or not, because all of them, as described, could be applied to any particular scenario in your organization, your team, your project, so it doesn’t really matter which one you pick up. I think a transition is really well there and if you take it as a pack, if you are going to read them all in the upcoming few months or years, I think you’re going to benefit from it, so go get it.

Thanks for Reading!