“Design is so simple. That’s why it’s so complicated.”- Paul Rand

Good design is never easy. It doesn’t matter where you’re at in UX design - beginner, intermediate, or expert, you should keep learning and working hard to improve your design skills.

UX books, one of the most essential learning resources, are the best way to learn UX design basics and improve your design skills quickly and systematically.

So, here are 40 of the must-read UX books and resources you don’t want to miss. They will help you learn UX design anytime, anywhere.

Must-read UX books for beginners

Author: Steve Krug

Category: Usability design

Today, thousands of UX designers and web developers have followed Krug’ s guide to learn the principles of UX design. If you’ve heard of this book before but haven’t picked it up, read it and you will find out why Don’t Make Me Think is a favorite among UX designers and developers around the world.

It gives you clear guidance and provides vivid examples of how to make your site easy for users. Lots of illustrations, photos, clear navigations, and great examples make it really fun to read and easy to understand.

It’s a perfect guide for those who want to learn web design and UX design from scratch.

Review: “After reading it over a couple of hours and putting its ideas to work for the past five years, I can say it has done more to improve my abilities as a Web designer than any other book.” -- Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing with Web Standards

Author: Don Norman

Category: Usability design

It’s one of the best UX design books out there. This book is interesting, inspiring, and pretty useful. It will open the door to a new world of design and teach you how to perceive it from a novel perspective. After reading this book, you will understand that design is everywhere, no matter if it's good or bad.

Even though it has been over 20 years since this book was published, but the core design ideas presented still apply.

Review: "A design classic. It will make you take the time to look at things you use without a second thought and understand the why and how of product design. As a designer I find myself applying rules and ideas from this book to my own work and going back to it time and time again.

If you're working in any area of design, whether it's web design, user experience, product, print or interior, this book will be a worthwhile investment." - Patrick Whitney

Author: Robin Williams

Category: UX basics

The Non-Designer’s Design Book is one of the most popular UX design books for beginners. Through her straightforward and clear writing style, Robin has taught thousands of people how to make their designs look better and professional using simple principles (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity, etc ).

Even if you don’t have a design background, you can easily apply these principles to your work. Highly recommended, a great book for novice designers.

Review: “I have no UX design background, but have always been interested in pursuing it as a hobby eventually. This has been an incredible resource for me as a beginner. The way the author lays out the book makes all this new information so easy to comprehend, and that is one of the things I like most about the book.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in UX design.” -- Emily Lewis

Author: Jesse James Garrett

Category: UX basics

UX for Beginners covers everything you need to know about UX design. It provides 100 self-contained lessons that include the whole spectrum of fundamentals. If you are looking for a book to learn UX basics systematically, this is the ideal book.

Review: “Literally such a fun and educational book. I learned a lot about the basics while laughing at his funny jokes, metaphors and sarcastic comments. It was relatable and easy to digest. I would definitely recommend it anyone that's curious about UX Design.” -- Dalton lvakin

Author: Jesse James Garrett

Category: UX basics

The Element of User Experience provides an excellent overview of the user experience field. It gives clear instruction on the basic elements of UX design. If you want to learn more about user experience elements, this is a good choice. Plus, it is another free book for beginners to learn UX design basics.

Review: “Absolutely the number 1 beginner's UX resource. Read this book before you read "Lean UX", read this book before you read "The UX Team of One". This book will give you the foundation necessary to think about User Experience and to understand what goes into creating a good product that makes users happy...” -- John Ellison

Author: Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and Dave Cronin

Category: Interaction design

Interaction and prototyping design is one of the basic design skills a UX designer should have. So, for a UX design novice, laying a solid interaction design foundation is very important. In this book, the authors explore valuable principles about thinking from the user’s perspective and tell us how to design user-centered interactions and products.

Review: “Great book for anyone interested in learning about product design/research. Touches upon the most important and fundamental topics in understanding users and designing user-centered. I read this book quite often just to keep my basics strong.” -- Chase Morrison

Author: Jesse James Garrett

Category: UX basics

A Project Guide to UX Design is a vital reference for designers to learn UX design principles with practical projects. This book covers various topics on UX design, such as personas, user-centered design, user testing, wireframes, and prototyping.

Whether you are an entrepreneur, project manager, or user experience designer, this book will probably become your go-to reference material.

Review: “If you are a young designer entering or contemplating entering the UX field this is a canonical book. If you are an organization that really needs to start grokking UX this book is also for you. " - Chris Bernard, User Experience Evangelist, Microsoft

Author: Cennydd Bowles / James Box

Category: UX basics

Undercover User Experience Design is another excellent UX design reference and hands-on guide for UX designers, web designers, and product designers,. It provides practical and useful advice on solving UX-related problems in real design cases.

Even though it is not the newest book, you can still find valuable examples and tricks here, whether you are a design beginner or expert.

Review: A wonderful, practical, yet subversive book. Cennydd and James teach you the subtle act of fighting for-and then designing for-users in a hostile world. --Joshua Porter, author of Designing for the Social Web

Author: Lukas Mathis

Category: Usability design

Designed for Use aims to teach designers to create easy-to-use applications and websites. In this book, Lukas offers us with a lot of valuable suggestions on usability design , and the most important thing that he points out is helping people get things done, easily and efficiently.

Review: "Designed for Use distills Lukas's brilliant insight into the much neglected area of usability, UX, and UI design. An essential, authoritative, and enlightening read." --Paul Neave, Interaction Designer, Neave Interactive

Author: Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden

Category: UX design methods & process

Lean UX focuses on users. It provides real-life UX examples and photos to teach you valuable lean UX principles, tactics and techniques from scratch. It is easy for you to learn how to transform your ideas into valid solutions and how to take advantage of user resources to optimize your project.

Do you want to know how big companies, like PayPal, meetup.com, and Dropbox, optimize their UX step by step? Read Lean UX.

Review: “I just finished reading Lean UX and I have to say that the author, Jeff Gothelf, nailed it! This book is very well organized, to the point, and describes practical solutions and techniques that fit in today’s ‘real world’ of software design.” -- Adrian Pomilio

Author: Jesmond Allen, James Chudley

Category: UX basics

Smashing UX design is an outstanding resource for learning and mastering UX design. The authors provide an overview of UX and User-Centered Design. They examine in detail sixteen of the most common UX design and research tools and techniques for your web projects.

So, if you are a UX design beginner, this is a wonderful book for you to learn UX basics. If you have intermediate or expert UX design knowledge, this is a good design manual to help you create better products.

Review: “Smashing UX Design is a practical reference manual for UXers, designers, developers, and product managers to refer to as the UX expert on their bookshelf.” – from the Back Cover

Author: Bill Buxton

Category: UX sketching and prototyping

Sketching User Experiences introduces sketching and early prototyping design methods for beginners, like you, to bring design ideas into life easily. The real-life personal examples help you have a better understanding the role of design in the real companies.

Review: "Informed design is essential. While it might seem that Bill Buxton is exaggerating or kidding with this bold assertion, neither is the case. In an impeccably argued and sumptuously illustrated book, design star Buxton convinces us that design simply must be integrated into the heart of business." --Roger Martin, Dean, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

Author: Leah Buley

Category: UX research

To become a great UX designer, you should learn and master basic UX research approaches.

The User Experience Team of One introduces a wide range of effective UX research methods that help you take less time and effort to create a better UX solution for websites/apps.

The author provides tools and insights for you to do more with less.

Review: “Leah Buley was instrumental in opening my eyes to a more effective approach to UX design. Her lightweight, practical, and collaborative approach not only molds a better user experience but also helps to engage and educate non-UX colleagues.” --Paul Boag, host of the Boagworld Web Design Podcast

Author: Leah Buley

Category: UX research

Interviewing Users is another fundamental UX research book. It provides practical interviewing tools and techniques for UX designers to conduct informative interviews with anyone. With this book, you will easily learn a wide range of good practices - from simply gathering data to uncovering powerful insights about the target customers.

Review: “Portigal's common-sense guide to interviewing is an excellent primer on methods and techniques. The sidebars, case studies, photos, and illustrations bring the information to life.” --Brenda Laurel, PhD, designer, researcher

Author: Susan Weinschenk

Category: UX psychology

To create a truly useful product for users, you should read UX psychology books to learn more about people. 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People is such a good book for you to learn how and why people do what they do.

It gives you information and scientific studies that will help you create a more intuitive and engaging design.

Review: “Great book. Written in an engaging way. The information is high level. Designers can use the guidelines immediately and prevents readers getting bogged down in too much science.” -- Kevin Bender

Author: Steve Krug

Category: Usability testing

Usability testing helps improve products effectively. It is also another essential skill that a good UX designer should master.

Rocket Surgery Made Easy is a usability testing book that introduces practical usability testing approaches. With this book, you can easily learn and apply these approaches to your website/app design.

Review: “Steve Krug delivers easy advice in a fun and engaging style that you can put to use to improve your website immediately. This book is a handbook for designing/developing customer-friendly websites that should be kept in the office of every web designer and developer.” – James Lewis

Best UX books for intermediates

Author: Don Norman

Category: Emotional design

Emotional design has become trendy in recent years. You can read Emotional Design to learn effective emotional design principles and techniques to activate users’ emotions correctly, no matter your UX design skill level.

Review: “Great Book. His first one is a classic that set the stage for the last 30 years of design and this one is what sets it towards the next century.” -- Kerry Bowman

Author: Dan Saffer

Category: Interaction design

Designing for Interaction is primarily concerned with the introduction of interaction design . Dan provides readers with a deep understanding of interaction design in his book, which is of great practical value for readers who want to excel in the field.

This book will help you:

Learn to create a design strategy that makes your work stand out from the competition

Use design research to uncover people’s behaviors, motivations, and goals in order to design for them

Employ brainstorming best practices to create innovative new products and solutions

Understand the process and methods used to define product behavior

It is a good book for you to further your interaction design knowledge.

Review: “Building products and services that people interact with is the big challenge of the 21st century. Dan Saffer has done an amazing job synthesizing the chaos into an understandable, ordered reference that is a bookshelf must-have for anyone thinking of creating new designs." -- Jared Spool, CEO of User Interface Engineering

Author: Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden

Category: UX skills

Team collaboration is one of the most effective approaches for designers to create a great product. So, to become an advanced UX designer, you should know how to collaborate with others effectively.

Lean UX is the perfect book for you to learn how to communicate and collaborate closely with team members of an agile product team, as well as gather feedback early and often.

Review: “This book is amazing. I did not know It was en English, but anyway it is perfect to get introduced in the UX wide wolrd. i really recommend to anyone that wants to learn about the lean UX.” -- Terry Johnson

Author: Vijay Kumar

Category: User research

Observing the User Experience introduces almost all aspects of user research in detail. For example, how to conduct a user research? How to do a user interview correctly? How to make a focus group?

Review: "Wow! So many of the user experience research methods we have refined and used over the years are now organized and described in detail in one book. It is an essential reference for any practitioner." --Christian Rohrer, Manager

Author: Barry Schwartz

Category: UX skills

Minimalistic design is very popular within UX and UI designs. However, do you know why minimalism is so popular and why “more is less” in UI/UX design?

The Paradox of Choice is a great book that explains why more is less. (Yes, take a moment to wrap your head around that.) It will teach you about how to make choices in a different way, leading to change your design process for the better.

Review: “A revolutionary and beautifully reasoned book about the promiscuous amount of choice that renders the consumer helpless. A must-read.”--Martin Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness

Author: Dan M. Brown

Category: UX communicating design

Communicating Design is one of the best UX books every designer should keep on their bookshelf. In this book, Dan shares various means of communicating to facilitate discussions and how to work with team members and clients, with the ultimate goal of improving performance.

Review: “I really enjoyed this book and the way it walked through the process. I have overseen the building of several sites and always keep in mind the ideas I learned in this book.” -- Barbara R.

Author: Vijay Kumar

Category: Design methods

101 Design Methods is one of the best user experience books. It introduces useful design methods to create new products, services and user experiences as a science. Every single method in this book is illustrated with examples.

It is good for advanced or junior UX designers to keep learning and improving their design skills systematically. Definitely one of the best books on user experience.

Review: “Very well documented, organized, design led from start to finish. A fantastic example of design thinking put into practice. Thanks!” – Jose Santos

Best UX books for experts

Author: William Lidwell

Category: Design skills

Universal Principles of Design is a comprehensive and cross-disciplinary encyclopedia of design. It provides 125 ways to enhance usability, increase visual appeal and make a better UX for a product.

It is a good resource to broaden and improve your design expertise.

Review: “Interesting, thoughtful, well-organized, and while an easy read, full of very useful design information.” -- R. S. Lloyd

Author: Mark Stickdorn

Category: Service design

Have you ever heard about service design? Don’t know how to do service design to improve the UX of your product? Read This Is Service Design Doing. It introduces details about service design and service design thinking.

You will learn how to actually do service design to improve the quality and the interaction between service providers and customers. You will know from theories to practices and create a wonderful product with ease.

Review: “As an experience designer, I feel like I've been waiting for this book all my life. It's delightfully laid out, easy to read, and packed with helpful examples and methods for doing excellent work in service- and experience design. I've never seen a book with such thoughtful and inclusive collaboration from so many practicing experts. Reading it is like drinking from a firehose of wisdom.” -- Frankie Abralind

Author: Jaime Levy

Category: UX strategy

UX strategy introduces valuable tools and techniques for you to craft an innovative and user-friendly digital product. It is a good resource for you and your team to improve work efficiency and create a better digital product.

Review: “As a seasoned UX Designer and Strategist for over 15 years, I found this book to be straightforward and extremely useful. The practical, real-world examples and "how-tos" made even this experienced UX professional grab my highlighter and comb through every page. Great book!” -- Stephen Brooks

Author: William Albert

Category: Usability design

Measuring the User Experience was the first book that focused on how to quantify the user experience. It introduces the best ways of collecting, analysising and presenting data, so that you can measure and improve the user experience easily and efficiently. All points have examples paired for better understanding.

Review: "This book discusses various efforts to identify, collect, analyze, improve, and present metrics that can be used to measure usability…It is well made. It is also fun to read. I recommend it to managers interested in or in charge of user experience design for their products." --ComputingReviews.com, January 2014

Author: Daniel Kahneman

Category: Usability design

Thinking, Fast and Slow is one of the international bestsellers for designers. It introduces two thinking systems for you to think and design differently and effectively.

Review: “An outstanding book, distinguished by beauty and clarity of detail, the precision of presentation and gentleness of manner. Its truths are open to all those whose System 2 is not completely defunct. I have hardly touched on its richness.” -- Galen Strawson

Author: Golden Krishna

If The Best Interface Is No Interface ” makes raises your eyebrows, you’re not alone. It seems counterintuitive, but the book does present interesting ideas. The author tackles the inconvenience caused by nagging screens and shows how we can build a technologically advanced world without digital interfaces.

His insight will surely help broaden your horizons and encourage you to think more deeply about both interface design and UX design.

Review: “This essential book will hopefully mark the moment in history when we say ‘ENOUGH!‘ to screen saturation and usher in a more meaningful co-habitation with technology.” -- Kevin Farnham

Author: Dale Carnegie

Category: Communication skills

Are you on the hunt for the perfect UX design job but just can’t seem to leave a good impression on recruiters, potential employers, and interviewers? You will find the answer in How to Win Friends and Influence People.

It introduces rock-solid and time-tested advice for you to win friends and influence other people. For example, in your case, you can directly apply six ways to make people like you to land that UX job you want.

Review: “This is a classic book, and for good reason. While Dale Carnegie is addressing specifics behaviors we should be using (or not) with people, underlying it all is a solid foundation of core principles. This was a great read that has lots to offer.” – Andrew Hawkins

So there you have it - the best UX design books you can read to improve your design skills.

5 Best free UX design eBooks

Here are 5 of the best free UX eBooks for you to read and learn anytime and anywhere:

50 User Experience Best Practices is a classic and amazing UX eBook which existed much longer than the agency that created it. It introduces 50 UX design tips and best practices, covering all aspects of user experience design from user research to front-end development.

Its creative casual tone and memorable graphics also make it easy for everyone to read and learn.

If you have learned about the UX theories and want to know how these theories could be applied to real design cases, 50 User Experience Best Practices is the ideal resource for you.

UX Storyteller is another classic UX eBook.

Unlike other UX books with massive narratives and examples, it introduces everything with massive interviews and stories from 42 UX professionals and experts in this field. Nearly every possible design scenario is covered.

Whether you are a UX design novice or expert, you can learn much from this book.

Written by MailChimp, The UX Reade includes all important components involved in the UX design process, and introduces a full set of valuable UX design insights in 5 categories, including Collaboration, Research, Design, Development and Refinement.

It is not only a good resource for beginners to learn UX design from scratch, and also is a handy guideline for veterans to create a brilliant website.

Bright Ideas for User Experience Designers uses 100 pages to share the real-world advice on UX design. You can read and learn many practical UX design skills, such as how to improve usability, ways to prototype design fasters, and tips to write user manuals, etc.

The best part of this eBook is its casual and interesting tone so that you can read without any confusion or pressure.

It is a good book for you to learn and kill time during your daily commute on the bus or subway.

Introduction to Good Usability is a good resource that will help you navigate the amazing UX design world. It is an excellent handbook for a UX design beginner.

5 best UI design books

UX design is closely related to UI design. To become a great UX designer, you should also learn and master some UI design basics. So, here are 5 of the best UI design books:

Author: Everett McKay

Category: UI basics

UI is Communication is a well-structured UI book providing an insightful view on UI design. The author explains how to design intuitive user interfaces by focusing on effective human communication.

In this book, each chapter feels like a revelation that gives you frameworks and structures to tame the chaotic experience of attempting to create software that users like and understand.

It is a good option for you to learn UI basics as well as broaden your horizons.

Author: Jenifer Tidwell

Category: UI design patterns

Designing interfaces shares hundreds of widely-used UI design patterns.

The author introduces each pattern with real examples and explains when, how and why you should use the pattern clearly. It is a perfect resource for you to learn about UI patterns from scratch.

Author: Jef Raskin

As its name suggests, The Humane Interface introduces innovative directions for designers to create interactive systems for their products.

The author explains how to implement desperately needed changes, offering a wealth of innovative and specific interface ideas for software designers, developers, and product managers.

So, if you need some new design ideas to create a completely different website/app, this book will get the job done.

Author: Theresa Neil

Category: UI patterns

Mobile Design Pattern Gallery provides over 90 UI design patterns for Android, iOS and Windows phone apps. It covers nearly all common mobile UI design patterns and best practices, such as the navigation, form, table, as well as Search and chart patterns, etc.

If you work on mobile apps often, this book is a must-read.

Author: Edward R. Tufte

Category: UI patterns

Data visualization has become an important part of UI design these days.

If you want to improve your ability to analyze and visualize data, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is a good book for you to get started.

It provides an excellent blend of theories and practices for you to learn how to display UI data more precisely, effectively and intuitively.

5 Best UX websites & blogs you should follow

Aside from books, UX websites and blogs are useful for you to learn UX design and get new design inspiration.

Here are 5 of the best UX websites and blogs you should follow:

1. Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine provides a special “UX design” category to share quality articles regularly, covering usability, information architecture, interaction design and other UX related topics. All these articles explain everything in depth and introduce something new for even experienced UX pros.

If you are looking for online resources to keep learning UX, Smashing Magazine should be at the top of your list.

2. Mockplus Blog

Many readers love the Mockplus Blog since it shares completely free design resources regularly under its “Resources” category. The shared quality articles also cover nearly all aspects of UI/UX design, such as the common UX design terms, UX design templates, website/app UX design, UX design tools, etc. It is simple, clean and easy for everyone to read and understand.

3. UX Booth

UX Booth is one of the most well-known professional UX blogs online. Unlike Smashing Magazine which shares articles about both UI and UX design, UX Booth focuses on UX topics. Each week, a couple of quality articles are posted, always sharing superb design ideas.

If you like reading about the newest UX design news or ideas, UX Booth is the place to go.

4. Usibility Geek

Usability Geek is another good website for you to read articles on the topic of general user experience and usability. It provides many categories, such as “Usability”, “User experience” and “UX guideline”. New posts will be published every Monday and Wednesday.

It is a fantastic read for UX designers in different levels.

5. UX Collective

UX Collective is a famous Medium channel that every UX designers should follow. Many quality articles written by UX professionals and experts are shared there. If you are looking for professional design suggestions, new inspiration and best practices, UX Collective is a perfect place to go.

4 best UX design tools you should master

A good UX design tool is essential for UXers to practice and improve their design skills, and hasten the designing process.

1. Smart Draw – UX tool for making user flowcharts quickly

Have you done with the user research and got some ideas about user flows? Smart Draw is a nice tool for you to map out your user flows quickly at the brainstorming stage. It allows you to draw any type of chart or diagram online and export to other tools for further editing, such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook.

2. Sketch – UX tool for interface design

If you get design ideas and need a tool to sketch them all out, the well-known design tool, such as Sketch, is a good choice for you. It offers rich design tools for you to create high-fidelity and beautiful interfaces. You can also make some simple motion designs to test your ideas simply.

3. Mockplus –UX tool for rapid prototyping and design collaboration

To design brilliant UX for your products, a handy prototyping and design collaboration tool, such as Mockplus, is essential for you to visualize your ideas quickly. It also enables you to discuss and collaborate with other team members.

Mockplus is an all-in-one online product design platform for designers, developers and product managers to create prototypes and UI flows, collaborate and handoff designs, as well as unify and manage design systems online with ease.

It takes only several minutes to translate your ideas into fully interactive prototypes with rich components, icons and interactions. It brings your entire product team online to collaborate and handoff designs online in real-time with auto specs, assets and code snippets.

Mockplus helps you design faster and collaborate better online.

4.User Testing – UX tool for user testing

To create a perfect product, UX designer should do some user researching and gather user feedback and needs often. And a good a user testing tool, such as User Testing, is absolutely a must-have.

User Testing provides video services for designers and customers to talk with each other directly for making better UX decisions.