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Design Thinking Books (2024)
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- kaizenb 8mo agoNoted couple of books. I've been curating (mostly design) books on a digital library: https://links.1984.design/books https://links.1984.design/books
- jgeurts 8mo agoThis looks like a really nice collection of books. Thanks for sharing!
- password54321 8mo agoThis isn't really a tasteful collection. It is just a bunch of popular books, all of which that I have read being about minimalism. If that's what you want you can just use Apple as a case study because that's what you end up getting if you want "modern" and minimal. Even just drop the CSS file from source into an LLM and go through how it is implemented.
- kaizenb 8mo agoAny suggestions are welcome. I would be happy to increase the quality of the library.
- WillAdams 8mo agoMy first recommendation would be to impose a hierarchy --- surely the books can be grouped in some fashion useful to the viewer? Perhaps by the intended reader? So maybe: - beginning designer - developer working with designer - developer working without assistance from a designer - supervisor working with team of designers and developers Long flat lists of undifferentiated items are a common problem in design and your page not solving that is decidedly not confidence-building. Also, was surprised not to see what I consider one of the best books on visual interface design listed: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/344729.Designing_Visual_Interfaces https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/344729.Designing_Visual_... Unfortunately, this book was marred reputationally by the reissue having a ghastly cover and poor quality screengrab reproductions --- track down a first edition if possible.
- kaizenb 8mo agoThanks, added the book to the library and will explore categorization options.
- password54321 8mo agoMost web design books are essentially going to tell you to put a navigation bar on top or on the side, with a big call to action button in the centre while laying everything out on a grid (hence why most websites now looks the same). Logo design books now are always going to tell you take inspiration from the Twitter or Nike logo e.g. something that is simple but easily recognisable from afar (everything is now a swirl or a a single polygon). The colour theory stuff is half pseudo-science and mostly going to tell you to pick from a small colour palette with a consistent primary/secondary colour while keeping in mind that colours are perceived differently in different cultures (now you have everything in black/blue/red and white). The only one that I liked was Refactoring UI because it demonstrated how small changes can add up to make something that looks amateur look professional. But you can probably learn more just by investigating things you like yourself and implementing them.
- verdverm 8mo agoDon't Make Me Think, still a gold standard
- janeway 8mo agoWow excellent thank you
- barrenko 8mo agoNice collection, "Weniger, aber besser" by Rams will suffice and is at home on any shelf.
- Brajeshwar 8mo agoI know it is more niche to the online/websites POV, but “Don’t Make Me Think” is a book that needs to be somewhere in the lines of “The Design of Everyday Things.” Of course, I re-read the latter as reminders and catch-up readings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Make_Me_Think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Make_Me_Think
- JKCalhoun 8mo agoHa ha, I love even the cover photo of “The Design of Everyday Things.”
- LocalPCGuy 8mo agoI was surprised this wasn't on there, even with a caveat that it's for online sources like you note.
- smikhanov 8mo agoI like how the author correctly shown the cover image for the "The Sciences of the Artificial", with plural 's' in 'sciences', but then in the paragraph praising it gleefully ignored it. Probably means this article wasn't written by AI!
- rrm1977 8mo agoThanks, I will fix this one. And yes, I am an old guy who doesn’t use AI in writing my articles. I tried once, and I felt like I was a slave to the machine ;) So, I am proud of my human mistakes in the age of AI perfection.
- carlsborg 8mo agoI will add : "The Design of Design" by Fred Brooks (of The Mythical Man Month fame)
- rrm1977 8mo agoVery good add, thanks!
- smurda 8mo agoTom Kelley and David Kelley, founders of Stanford's Design School and IDEO (the industrial design firm that made things like Apple's first mouse and the standup toothpaste tube) have a great book, Creative Confidence. Here's their website for the book, along with some tools and useful instructional videos https://www.creativeconfidence.com/tools/ https://www.creativeconfidence.com/tools/
- chrisweekly 8mo ago+1 agreed, Creative Confidence is an insipiring book.
- yakkomajuri 8mo agoI'm a dev and recently picked up "The Design of Everyday Things" as an attempt to become more design-oriented. Everyone raves about this being like the bible of design. So far I'm about 80 pages in and have found it extremely academic and not very practical, sometimes deriving conclusions that are so far from reality that they are a bit concerning, like how a strong password does not matter because once they inevitably leak they can always be cracked via rainbow tables (the author doesn't use this exact term). As we know the exact point of a strong password is that it will not be in a rainbow table. Of course the original version is pretty old but I picked up the latest revised version. Still some interesting insights and I haven't given up on the book quite yet but it's been a ton of theory and a lot of terminology so far.
- Brajeshwar 8mo agoFor Devs/Engineers and even many designers, things some of us tend to take for granted were amazing to them. So, my first recommendation is to read Refactoring UI end-to-end and keep a copy handy at your desk. https://www.refactoringui.com https://www.refactoringui.com PS. Refactoring UI is from the guys who created TailwindCSS.
- WillAdams 8mo ago$99 for a 218 page PDF which, while it has a Goodreads page which rates it highly: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/43190966-refactoring-ui https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/43190966-refactoring-... doesn't have a working "Purchase on Amazon" link, and searching there for: "Refactoring UI Adam Wathan , Steve Schoger" returns no results. One can get two "free" chapters in exchange for one's e-mail address. Book deal fall through? Why?
- xandrius 8mo agoEither you want to support the authors and give them the price they ask or don't. You being on this platform gives me the assumption that you can definitely find pretty much any PDF on the Internet for free, in a way or another.
- gond 8mo agoPlease don’t use Design Thinking. Design Thinking is a subset of Systems Thinking (this is the polite interpretation). Design Thinking does with its sole existence what Systems Thinking tried to avoid: Another category to put stuff into, divide and conquer. It is an over-simplified version of the original theories. Better: Jump directly to Systems Thinking, Cybernetics and Systems Theory (and if measurements are more your thing, even try System Dynamics). I can only recommend that anyone interested in this topic take a look at the work of one of the masters of Systems Thinking, Russel Ackoff: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9p6vrULecFI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9p6vrULecFI This talk from 1991 is several dozen books heavily condensed into one hour. (Russell Ackoff is considered one of the founders of Operations Research and ironically came to be regarded an apostate as he tried to reform the field he co-founded. He subsequently became a prominent figure of Systems Thinking) My 2c. I'll show myself out.
- baxtr 8mo agoSomeone tried to explain systems thinking to me with respect to a planning effort we had. I have to admit that it was very hard to me to follow what they were saying. Maybe I’m dumb, maybe the person didn’t explain it well, or, maybe system thinking is really complex and thus hard to convey and use. Design thinking on the other hand is easy to understand and apply.
- user_7832 8mo agoI have no idea what the exact topic is, but > maybe system thinking is really complex and thus hard to convey and use. I'm pretty sure that's not true. If you can follow how A leads to -> B, then that's about it all. Systems thinking is the same principle at a larger scale, with interesting side effects at times (eg network effects/group think/emergent phenomenon showing up).
- turnsout 8mo agoDesign Thinking (and more broadly, human-centered design) is a pragmatic framework for doing product design in an effective and productive manner. Systems Thinking is a massively more general superset. I'm not really sure how you'd operationalize that on a design project, except by following first principles, which would essentially get you to DT / HCD.
- huhtenberg 8mo agoDesign thinking is a human-centered, iterative approach to creative problem- solving, focusing on deeply understanding users' needs to develop innovative solutions through phases like Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. Apparently. It's not immediately clear how it's different from your good old "regular" design.
- spinningslate 8mo agoI think that's the point. The underpinning exhortation is to "think about design" where the outcome is something that successfully addresses users needs, is feasible to create, and commercially viable. "Design Thinking" as a brand has codified that in several ways - not all successful. But the underlying principle is sound: there are plenty of examples of products/services that failed to address one or more of the 3 dimensions. I found this quote from the linked article [0] more helpful: > Design thinking can be described as a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity. [0]: https://www.designorate.com/design-thinking-guide-what-why-how/ https://www.designorate.com/design-thinking-guide-what-why-h...
- yashasolutions 8mo agoit is not - just a way to position design and untie it from the visual output that is also called design. Design thinking will not make you a logo (but a logo designer could pretty much do design thinking...)
- arnorhs 8mo agoYes I agree, and the replies don't really make it any more clear. The biggest differentiator of design thinking is really addressing the XY problem. In 95% of cases clients will come to you to design their solution. Ie they already think they have a solution to their problem and now they want it to look good. Design thinking is basically more like root cause analysis, or the 5 why's.. and an emphasis on taking to end users (the people with the problem) without having a solution. Once you understand the problem more fundamentally is only when you start cooking up with a solution. And the result of that process might not even be a traditional design, but perhaps just a tweak to something, like moving your onboarding to later in the ca process.. In practice however.. 95% of designers who say they practice design thinking disregard this, and just want to design wherever the client asks for
- gizzlon 8mo ago"Must read" ? Must? GTFO with this hyperbolic language
- wetpaws 8mo ago[dead]
- any1 8mo agoI was very disappointed when I learned that this wasn't about designing books that think.
- bradbeattie 8mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
- andai 8mo agoI love 101 Things I Learned at Architecture School. It's a very light, approachable book, dealing with surprisingly universal principles. Also it has very nice pictures. Most of it also applies to game dev, and to the design of experiences.
- what_was_it 8mo agoI improved my doodling skills from that book, but I'm not sure I learned anything generalizable.
- lefstathiou 8mo agoMy two cents as a 20 year product manager with +10 enterprise applications under my belt (and having read several of these): # "Don't make me think" is a seminal work on design thinking for online services. I've yet to come across a book with as much relevance and substance even though it was written for the dot com era. # "Positioning" by Al Reis is a book I wish I read 15 years ago when I started my company... your product's strategic positioning will greatly inform and shape design decisions (typography, colors, tones, copy, etc) # "Ogilvy on Advertising" - written by the legend himself, once you read this book, it will change the way you see all ads in any medium
- stevenhubertron 8mo agoI have similar experience and agree with your book recommendations. Depending on your vertical I would add the Toyota Way later to understand factory design and efficiency. It’s interesting to read back to back.
- TZubiri 8mo agoIt seems that I have learned to distrust websites that show ads. I don't think there's nothing wrong with wanting to get paid via ads. But I don't see why a list of "design thinking" books should be some piece of info that you should be paid for. At least there's an author to the article I guess
- bsoles 8mo agoDesign Thinking is the Data Science of UX: an attempt to gain influence in fields that you don't have expertise in. Even though there might be universal design principle that can be applied in many fields, the Design Thinking people think that they can just come in and design user interfaces, etc. without really having an expertise in the particular field. Design Thinking works for selling consulting and not much else. Nobody wants another Agile(TM) process imposed on software developers (in my particular case) that attempts to turn developers into factory line workers.
- ccppurcell 8mo agoCan you give an analogous example for data science? I confess ignorance here, and always took the term at face value. Is the issue that "data science" tries to be agnostic about the source of the data? (I'm not claiming that that is true, just guessing)
- bsoles 8mo agoSure. There are many examples of data scientists attempting to use complex Machine Learning and Deep Learning models to predict machine (bearings, gears, etc.) failures from vibration data, where a simple Fourier Transform (FFT) provides a lot more insight and predictive powers about the same problem. However, spectrum analysis is not something that data scientists learn at school, yet every mechanical/electronics engineer working in the field knows about it. So, without an expertise in a particular field, data scientists often reach for a big hammer, when more specialized tools exist and are known to the experts in the field.
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- IOT_Apprentice 8mo agoYet I suspect that mechanical engineers are not writing software for companies in the large. There are software developers doing so. I suspect that they should be consulted by data science folks as domain experts. That said won’t AI replace both? ;)
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- 7tythr33 8mo agoWhat most people fail to realise is something quite simple about “design” - it’s the discipline of bridging human behaviour and “things” (be that objects or software). Don Norman’s book covers a lot on human behaviour, which is the correct lens through which to view “design”.
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- seemaze 8mo ago[dead]
- listenfaster 8mo agoI’m not a game designer, but 15 years after initially reading it, Jesse Schell’s “The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses” really sticks with me in any product design context. Organizing your thoughts around the lenses presented in this book makes for productive discussion, and can turn subjective points (an example might be how frictionless or not a UI element might be) into more objective points. I suggest checking it out. The author posted a deck of the lenses here: https://deck.artofgamedesign.com https://deck.artofgamedesign.com
- truenfel 8mo agoIf anyone's interested in how environment shapes behavior: I wrote "Leave the Door Open." It's about designing spaces that reduce isolation and relax the nervous system. Based on research like the Rat Park experiments showing environment beats willpower. Practical room-by-room changes. The Substack for Open Enough Design is here: https://OEDmethod.substack.com https://OEDmethod.substack.com and you can find a link to the book there too.
- amai 8mo agoDesign thinking is a scam. I once had to took part in a design thinking class (my company wanted that). The consultant clearly were just waiting to see what kind of ideas we would come up with for some product. If an interesting idea came up in their classes they would later try to monetize it. So basically you pay them so they get your product ideas for free.
- rrm1977 8mo agoAh, I am sorry to hear so. Yes, many of the courses out there are scum, but not he design thinking itself.
- ines_leal 8mo agoHighly recommend "A *New* Program for Graphic Design" by David Reinfurt as a more graphic design-focused overview of design thinking