Like most skills, product design skills come from doing it (over and over). But a bit of reading helps. Here are books that helped to prime the pump.

Definitely recommended

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

You would not think that a book featuring a teapot on the cover would be relevant to today’s digital products, but it is. Good design and bad design is all around us. You just have to look for it. And once you do, you’ll never look at doors in the same way again.

Rocket Surgery Made Easy: the Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems by Steve Krug

Krug’s most famous book is Don’t Make Me Think. Originally published in 2000, it made the case for the importance of design to the Web.

However, if you’re already a believer, I’d argue that Rocket Surgery is the one to read. It provides much more actionable steps for improving usability. But most importantly, it teaches you that improving usability doesn’t require a costly pseudo-scientific study of 100 target users. Just a handful of people will get you most of the way there.

The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams

If you’ve ever tried to do a bit of visual design (e.g. for an interface) and it comes out looking woefully amateurish, here’s the book for you. It teaches you four key principles (with a handy acronym of CRAP): contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity. In other words, use CRAP to fix your crap. Ha (I’m too easily amused).

Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster

Despite the title, it’s not just for game design. If you’ve ever had to build something “engaging”, this will help you understand what it really takes. Basically sustained engagement needs tight feedback and a sense of progression, which has to be carefully balanced. Too flat = boring. Too steep = confusion. Key takeaway: it’s hard, takes a lot of investment, and the next time someone suggests simply gamifying something, just vomit on them.

Searching for something better

Database Design for Mere Mortals: A Hands-On Guide to Relational Database Design by Michael J. Hernandez

Product design is often thought of as being a front-end discipline. But digital products are rooted in data. Hence you need to pay attention to the database: the information being captured and the relationships. It determines what your product can and can’t do.

Hernandez’s tome to teaching database design gets too nitty gritty for product design purposes. There are some gems in there, but you have to wade through several hundred pages.

For any aspiring database design book writers out there, I’d like to see something that teaches the fundamentals to a non-expert audience in less than 100 pages. Perhaps it should focus on “most common database screw-ups of startup teams”. Get it wrong and you can kneecap your product’s future flexibility and growth.

The book just primes the pump

Like in any discipline, it’s easy to take the literature and make it the end goal. Don’t get hung up on keeping things academically pure. The overwhelming key to moving forward is to just do it. Design, build, evaluate, iterate.

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GS Dun works on developing new ventures. The name is short for “get sh** done”, so while we can talk the talk, we prefer to keep our meetings short and just get on with it.