Recommended reading for junior planners doing user-centered design
1. The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman
The first book to read. It makes you understand that things should be built so that the user — not the engineer, not the maker — needs them and can actually use them, and lays out a few design principles for doing that. It's Donald Norman's first book for a general audience. Light enough to read on the subway, but enough to get the basic concepts.
2. Things That Make Us Smart, Donald Norman
Principles of human-centered design — a bit more theoretical.
3. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper
The original title is 'The Inmates Are Running the Asylum,' where the 'asylum' is software and the 'inmates' are the developers. Alan Cooper — credited with the prototypes of Visual Basic and MS Project — wrote this to argue that products and services should be planned not by developers, but by interaction designers. Along the way, he unpacks how developers and users differ. He also argues — for the first time — for bringing the concept of persona into services from a goal-oriented design perspective.
4. Emotional Design, Donald Norman
Where The Design of Everyday Things and Things That Make Us Smart emphasize that the most important thing about humans and products is the user's ability to do their tasks, this book adds that emotion matters too. There's the old HCI debate of function vs. usability, usability vs. aesthetics, and Norman talks about the user's emotional side — that pretty things actually work better.
5. The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin
Overshadowed by Steve Jobs, but the book Jef Raskin — who originally started the Macintosh — left behind. Aside from the decision to put only one button on the mouse, it's a conceptually valuable read.
6. Subject to Change
Uses many case studies to talk about what product strategy should look like from the user's side.
7. Living with Complexity (Simple Isn't the Answer), Donald Norman
Reads like an argument essay, but a lot of the design principles Norman has always argued for resurface inside it — a good chance to think through the basic principles again.
8. The Experience Economy
Out of print and hard to find. Less about planning itself than a money-making, business perspective — but it argues that perspective through emotion and user value.
9. Design Thinking, Roger Martin
Design thinking became well known when Tim Brown of IDEO wrote about it in HBR, but Professor Roger Martin was the one who actually coined the term and concept. After this, it's a good idea to read Tim Brown's Change by Design.
10. Change by Design, Tim Brown
11. The Opposable Mind, Roger Martin
12. The Art of Innovation, IDEO
Feels like an IDEO promo, but fundamentally you can see the process of observing users, forming hypotheses, and making prototypes.
13. The Ten Faces of Innovation
Argues for playing several different roles to build a service or product from the user's perspective.
'The Invisible Computer' is also worth a recommendation. It actually lays out the role of a user-centered designer and the skill sets they need.
The Experience Economy has been reissued by 21st Century Books. http://www.yes24.com/24/goods/.... For reference, The Experience Economy's Updated Edition also came out in 2011.
