Get ahead as a UX professional by reading a non-UX book

25 crowdsourced recommendations from fellow practitioners

(Credit: Devon Divine/Unsplash)

What non-UX books do you often recommend to other practitioners?

You’re probably familiar with some of the classics (e.g. The Design of Everyday Things, Don’t Make Me Think…). But even if a book isn’t written explicitly for us, it can have many direct lessons.

This was a question I recently posed on LinkedIn and X (fka Twitter). Both the quality and volume of responses were surprising.

Popular recommendations

Since the books aren’t specific to our discipline, you might expect that responses would have been all over the board, with no two responses looking alike. Although there was a lot of variety, a handful of books came up time and time again as perennial favorites.

All of these were recommended by at least two commenters, and several were recommended by three or more:

• Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman and his late colleague Amos Tversky’s Nobel prize-winning work on cognitive biases revolutionized the way economists thought about human decision-making. He distilled six decades of research into this accessible book.
• Nudge: The Final Edition, by Richard H. Thaler and Cass Sunstein: Anton Krotov, UX Research Lead at GoodHabitz, wrote: “Very good piece on socioeconomic behavior. Really expanded my view on how humans could behave and why it is so.” Indeed, this book was once required reading for a university course I taught on User Experience methods.
• Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert Cialdini. A professor of social psychology at Arizona State University wrote this compelling summary of the enduring principles of persuasion and how they manifest in salespeople, fundraisers, con artists, and other charmers. This offers a wide range of lessons for UX professionals, whether they’re looking to get ahead in their careers or give their work more impact within their organizations.
• Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, Third Edition, by Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, and Emily Gregory. A New York Times bestseller and business book classic, this book equips readers with tools for having productive dialogue when emotions are hot and stakes are high.
• Humble Inquiry, Second Edition: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling, by Edgar H. Schein and Peter A. Schein. We often consider ourselves the student of our users in learning how we can make our products work for them. What if we applied that approach to the rest of our lives? This book treats questions as a tool to build relationships and collaborate with others.
• Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It, by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz: Unlike a hostage negotiation, there are few if any emergencies in UX — so why read a book on this skillset? Keith Ford, Principal UX Designer at Walmart, explained: “Designers are often in a position where they need to push back and influence without authority, this book teaches proven negotiation tactics used in life and death situations and how to apply them in a corporate environment.”
• The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business, by Erin Meyer. The way that we work, lead, and resolve conflicts as a team is conditioned by the culture surrounding us, which can create unseen obstacles in larger companies. As Cătălina Manea, Senior UX Designer at eBay, said, “Super helpful in any instance but especially when working with global distributed teams.”
• Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, by Caroline Criado Perez. In an age of biased LLMs and GenAI tools trained on big data, many are trying to understand how the data and analytics that inform their tools can harm underrepresented users. Cecile Elliott, Senior UX Designer at Suited Connector, called it an “absolutely fascinating and infuriating read.”
• The Complete Short Stories, by Anton Chekhov: Notably one of the only fiction recommendations, but from a master who revolutionized the form of the short story. Rebecca Dodd, Senior User Researcher at the Department for Works and Pensions, elaborated: “Without the keen observations of his short stories … I would never have become a user researcher. His storytelling schema complements the more commonly cited, and also very useful schema from Aristotle’s Poetics, which I also recommend to anyone in a user-centred design profession.”
• Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace. A co-founder of the animation studio Pixar describes how their pioneering approach to storytelling and film production works on a fundamental level, with practical lessons for any professional.
• Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes, by Morgan Housel. What lessons can history and psychology teach us about human nature? Housel distills them down in a way that you can apply to yourself, your users, and your organization.

Selected recommendations

Although they were recommended only once, these books stood out from among the others. In most cases, the subject matter was intriguing. In several others, it was an added benefit to get the perspective of an industry veteran or thought leader:

• Genius 101, by Dean Keith Simonton . This recommendation comes from usability pioneer and author of UX Tigers, Jakob Nielsen. “In this context, ‘genius’ doesn’t mean extreme outliers like Mozart or Oppenheimer (though they are discussed),” he said. “It’s about high-functioning, high-IQ individuals, and disproportionately many UX people fall into this category and will benefit from understanding things like the lifecycle of eminent intellectual performance.”
• Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud. “There are conventions that have strong associations which are almost inescapable,” explained Rob Solomon, Lead UX Engineer at CivicDX. “I read that for the first time in undergrad, and it gave me the lens to look at both existing and emerging technology platforms and consider the big picture surrounding the experience (including what the “reader” is bringing to the table).” Jakob Nieslen added: “One big point in the book is how simplification by removing specifics can make communication more universal. Like the standard smiley 🙂 which doesn’t look like any human (doesn’t even have a nose) and therefore represents all of us.”
• Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, by David Graeber. Many of us in UX enter the field with high ideals about our potential to affect the world for good. It’s tempting to make our work central to our identities. This book challenges those ideas. Maria Panagiotidi, Head of UX Research at Oyster and author of UX Psychology, said, “A bit political and maybe controversial but helpful to provide some context to modern jobs in the middle of a UX job market crisis.”
• Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, by David Eagleman. Another entry on the list of books popularizing the lessons of cognitive science, Maria Panagiotidi described it as a “quick intro to subconscious brain and its importance in our everyday lives.”
• Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble, by Dan Lyons. We sometimes forget from the inside how strange working in tech can be to those on the outside. Disrupted tells the personal story of a magazine writer who joined HubSpot as a marketing fellow. Independent UX Consultant David Hamill wrote: “It teaches you about some of the toxic and cult-like behaviours you’ll encounter in tech companies. Also it’s really funny.”
• The Halo Effect: … and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers, by Phil Rosenzweig. Corporate leaders ostensibly reach their positions on a track record of good judgment, yet examples of biased and backwards decision-making aren’t hard to find. Author and Consultant Tom Kerwin said it shows “just how massively we misattribute causes and effects based on retrospective coherence.”
• Stealing the Corner Office: The Winning Career Strategies They’ll Never Teach You in Business School, by Brendan Reid. Tom Kerwin explained, “career progression doesn’t really work the official way it’s talked about.” This book offers an unconventional playbook for climbing the corporate ladder.
• The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life, by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander. “A psychologist/therapist and an orchestra conductor write how to reframe one’s thinking to be less self-limiting. It’s a great read for problem solvers and people leaders,” wrote Jeff Scott, Principal UX Researcher at Charter Communications.
• The Timeless Way of Building, by Christopher Alexander. A philosophical book about architecture that contrasts modern approaches to the more organic traditional way that towns, villages, and the places within them have grown — with lessons that apply to building software and products. Principal Product Designer Leo Vroegindewey, Product Strategist at The Triangle Offense, described it as “very heavy, but rewarding.” (He also recommended Alexander’s book, Notes on the Synthesis of Form.)
• Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, by Leonard Koren. If you struggle with perfectionism at work, you may enjoy this recommendation from Jeremy Hulette, Design Advisor at Propportunity AG, who summarized it thus: “A short but thoughtful book on the beauty of imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness.”
• Financial Intelligence: A Manager’s Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean, by Karen Berman and Joe Knight. A recommendation from Haden Yonce, Head of Product Design at TD. If you struggle to parse the financials discussed in your company’s all-hands meetings, or how you can connect the work you do to the numbers most important to the business, this book breaks things down.

Bonus personal recommendations

These responses show how well-read UX professionals are as a group. As an avid reader myself, I’d like to offer three books that didn’t turn up in the thread but that I think fit the theme well, offering powerful lessons for our work:

• Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts, by Annie Duke. A cognitive psychologist turned champion poker player describes how probabilistic thinking can help people to face situations of uncertainty and make better decisions.
• When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, by Daniel H. Pink. Billed as the world’s first “when-to” book in a world of “how-to” books, Pink describes how our internal chronotype influences daily cycles of energy peaks and troughs, and offers actionable strategies like the Nappuccino to boost your productivity each week.
• The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, by Walter Isaacson. The biographer of Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk tells the story of computing and Silicon Valley, beginning with Ada Lovelace. Understanding how our profession fits into this broader history will help you contextualize your work.

The bottom line

If you’re fortunate to have a professional development budget as a benefit through your employer, this is a great way to use it up. You may be able to convince a few colleagues to pick them up so you can discuss them together.

Whoever foots the bill, a great book is a bargain — often summarizing years of an author’s work and research for the price of a modest restaurant meal.

This has been a selected list — many other books were mentioned in the threads. One thoughtful reader even compiled them all into a public spreadsheet. But the 25 listed here should get your reading list for the remainder of the year set for now.

A version of this article first appeared in The ¼″ Hole, a newsletter about UX research.

Special thanks to all who contributed to the threads. This article contains no affiliate links.