Books that will teach you how to crack the behavioral and UX design codes

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The following is a guest post by Cherryl Pereira, Head of Content at Chisel Labs

UX design is all about understanding the user experience.

UX designers are often seen as the UX architect who makes sure that people will be able to use the product in a way that maximizes their satisfaction and your business’s conversion rate.

UX design can help you create an app that is easy for users to navigate or one with beautiful graphics and text that sticks in people’s minds.

It might seem like UX design is just about aesthetics, but it goes much deeper than this because UX encompasses everything from interface design to copywriting.

Behavioral psychology and UX design are closely linked.

When you know human behavior and can predict user experiences, that means you may have cracked the code.

In this article, we shall discuss some books in this space.

1. Brain Rules
2. Thinking Fast and Slow
3. The Design of Everyday Things
4. Cognitive Psychology for UX Designer: How To Think Like a Cognitive Scientist
5. The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience
6. The UX Book of Information Architecture
7. The UX Reader
8. The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience
9. The UX Booke of Prototyping
10. Designing UX
11. Human-Centered Design: The Process of Innovating for People
12. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
13. What Users Do: Interviews with People Who Use Everyday Things
14. The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience

• Brain Rule

The first book on behavioral psychology is called “Brain Rules”, written by  John Medina.

This book focuses on 12 rules that are important to how people think, feel, and behave in the modern world.

This is important for UX designers because it involves a dialogue on the patterns developed by the human brain, the most important UX component.

Once you understand this it becomes easy to draw patterns and make conclusive decisions about your UX design.

• Thinking Fast and Slow

The book “Thinking Fast and Slow” is also by John Medina. This delves deeper into the patterns of thinking that UX designers need to understand to be able to predict user behavior accurately.

The reason this matters for UX design is because people are often unaware of what they want until you show it to them, so UX designers must capture the very detail that they assess needs to be known and shown. In other words, it is the science of UX design.

This book also focuses on UX design, but from a different perspective – that of the user experience itself.

The UX matters because it is not about what you think will be good for users to have – it’s all about whether they value and desire those things too. If so, then great UX becomes valuable; if not… well

• The Design of Everyday Things

“The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman.

This book is a classic in UX and behavioral psychology circles because it explains how to create objects that are easy for users to use, whether they’re designing a chair or an app.

In addition, the author discusses what makes people happy with their interactions within certain environments.

It also talks about how UX can be applied to medical, transportation, and other industries. It is an important read for UX designers and business owners.

Not just that, it also  gives UX designers a solid foundation of how to think about UX problems. The highlight is that UX design is about people, not screens.

• Cognitive Psychology for UX Designers: How To Think Like a Cognitive Scientist.

This book can be considered as the first step of becoming a UX designer.

By reading this book you will come across many areas of psychology that are closely related to UX research and practice including attention, memory, emotion, and the science of pleasure.

One must pick this to understand UX design and user experience.

It is extraordinarily convincing, and it will convince you UX is a science.

Have you ever thought UX is about the UX designer? Think again. If that  UX designer is not at the center of UX, then who is?

• The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience.

This book helps UX designers to produce great work. The process outlined in this book has been used by many big names like Facebook, Microsoft, or Google.

It contains 12 chapters that are divided into three sections and it is a comprehensive UX design book.

It is about UX experience, and it is an inspiring read for all UX designers because of its many great UX principles in the field, including UX design, UX research, UX strategy, UX evaluation, UX process, and many more.

• The UX Book of Information Architecture.

This book is about UX design research, user experience, and the question of why things are designed the way they are.

It includes information architecture for UX designers using web-based media to build a website that accomplishes its business needs while meeting users and their UX design needs.

This may be a great start for UX designers who are new to the field. Not just that,  but UX design students and UX professionals may find the information architecture insights very helpful.

• The UX Reader.

This is a UX book that includes examples of great user experiences in different types of products, including:

– Mobile UX design (phone)

– eCommerce UX design (shopping experience)

– Web UX Design (eBooks)

It encapsulates the very best UX design practices from the leading UX designers in a variety of industries.

• The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience.

This is an authoritative UX book that delivers crucial information with practical advice on how to create effective user experiences, including how to avoid common mistakes by understanding human behavior.

It is an essential read to learn UX design best practices.

Treat it like the bible of known UX failures and successes and you would know exactly what to not do and what to do as a UX designer.

This book examines how UX designers can use insights from behavioral psychology to create effective UX designs that offer a better user experience and improve business results.

The authors explore the behavior of people in the digital world, such as when they surf online shopping sites, navigate websites, or download apps on their smartphones.

• The UX Book of Prototyping.

This book is about how UX designers can prototype their products and services, including websites, apps, and software.

It contains practical advice for UX design prototyping in all stages of user experience creation from early research through final testing results.

• Designing UX

A Practical Guide for Getting User Experience Design Right.” If you want to learn UX and user experience strategies, this book is the best place to start.

It has a lot of great UX stories that will keep you entertained as well as informed about UX design principles such as persona-based UX research, prototyping, and the science of designing the perfect user experience based on factual evidence collection.

This may seem like a UX design book but it is much more than that.

• Human-Centered Design: The Process of Innovating for People.

This is another great UX design and user experience book.

It goes over the entire UX process, with a special focus on understanding users and research methods used to learn more about them.

That includes ethnography, contextual inquiry, card sorting, and so on.

• Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things.

Human-computer interaction tends to be viewed as a more logical, rational process than human-to-human interactions.

But this book dives into emotional design and describes how emotion plays an important role in the UX design of products intended to design for emotion.

UX designers have to consider the emotional context in which they are designing products because emotions play a crucial role in how people perceive their experiences with your product.

This book provides some really good tips about building great UX using emotion. It can help designers create better

• What Users Do: Interviews with People Who Use Everyday Things.

This book examines the minds of real people, not what we believe them to be thinking based on our assumptions about their behavior or simple observation.

The result is a revelatory understanding of users by learning from their actions in the physical world and how

• The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience.

This book goes into more detail on UX design methodologies that don’t just apply to digital products but also physical ones too.

It covers areas such as user research, task analysis, and information architecture.

The UX process is broken down in the context of mobile apps.

Conclusion

It may almost seem like UX design and behavioral psychology are the same, but there is a difference.

Behavioral psychologists study how people think, behave or interact as individuals while UX designers look at users as groups across sectors such as finance or health care.

One of the most important tools in UX design is to understand those who use your product so you may create a UX design solution that is not only effective but also user-friendly.

UX designers are experts in mapping behavior patterns of users and can predict how people will respond to a given change or addition on your site, product or service.

A good way to learn about UX design principles while getting an idea of what it means to be a UX designer would be by capturing the essence of what  UX design is all about by reading UX books.

Books that UX designers love to read are the ones that help them understand user behavior and how they can use UX design principles in their work life.

Cherryl Pereira is the Head of Content at Chisel. Chisel Labs is a premiere agile product management software company that brings together roadmapping, team alignment, and customer connection.