Product design is all about identifying and building new products that solve a user problem or address a market need. To make the product successful, it should be a perfect mixture of user needs and business goals. Getting better at designing products involves knowledge, experience, and skills. Books are the experiences and perspectives of the author by which one can gain a good understanding. Books are excellent sources of knowledge, and below are some of them that give a good sense of Product Design. These 8 books give you a better understanding of Product Design. 

A) Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Why do some products capture widespread attention while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of sheer habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us? Nir Eyal answers these questions (and many more) by explaining the Hook Model. It is a four-step process embedded in many successful companies' products to subtly encourage customer behavior. Through consecutive "hook cycles," These products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.

Hooked is based on Eyal's years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a startup founder—not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, startup founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how effects influence our behavior. Eyal provides readers with:

• Practical insights to create user habits that stick.

• Actionable steps for building products people love.

• Fascinating examples from the iPhone to Twitter, Pinterest to the Bible App, and many other habit-forming products. 

Get your copy here. 

B) The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition

The Design of Everyday Things aims to educate people on the inborn qualities of user-friendly design and how construction from scratch actually occurs. It is considered to be one of those books that influence world thinking patterns. The importance of the knowledge provided in this book varies with time. It contains concepts that have been used by mankind since ancient times. The book explains at length about disciplines, including behavioral psychology, ergonomics, and design practice. 

Key features of the book:

1. The book was initially published in 1988 using The Psychology Of Everyday Things as its title. 

2. The author has given life to specific terms such as 'user-centered design' and 'affordance.' 

3. Gives valuable insights into how small, unnoticed aspects of the design can affect a large portion of everyday, practical life.

Don Norman has served as a faculty member at Harvard, the University of California, San Diego, Northwestern, and KAIST (South Korea). He also worked as a VP at Apple and an executive at HP and a startup.

Get your copy here. 

C) Jobs to be Done

• Why do so many innovation projects fail? 
• What are the root causes of failure? 
• How can they be avoided? 

Since 1990, Tony Ulwick has pioneered an innovation process that answers these questions. An insight into Jobs-to-be-Done theory was, "people have underlying needs or processes in their lives, that they are addressing in some way right now". For 25 years, Ulwick and his company, Strategyn, have helped over 400 companies, applying Jobs-to-be-Done Theory in practice with a success rate of 86%—a 5-fold improvement.

The book offers learning on,

• Why companies fail at innovation and how to avoid critical mistakes. 
• How to employ the Jobs-to-be-Done Theory Needs Framework to categorize, define, capture, and prioritize customer needs. 
• A Jobs-to-be-Done Growth Strategy Matrix to classify, understand and utilize the 5 strategies that drive growth. 
• Outcome-Based Segmentation: how does it create new opportunities?
• The Outcome-Driven Innovation ties customer-defined metrics to the customer's Job-to-be-Done, transforming every aspect of opportunity discovery, marketing, and innovation. 
• The Language of Job-to-be-Done – the syntax and lexicon of innovation.

Get your copy here. 

D) Actionable Gamification

The new era of Gamification and Human-Focused Design optimizes motivation and engagement over traditional function-focused design. Within the industry, studies on game mechanics and behavioral psychology have become proliferated. However, few people understand how to merge the two fields into experience designs that reliably increases business metrics and generates a return on investment. Gamification Pioneer Yu-kai Chou takes the reader on a journey to learn about his twelve years of obsessive research. This book explains the Octalysis Framework and how to apply the framework to create engaging and successful experiences in their product, workplace, marketing, and personal lives. 

Effective gamification is a combination of game design, game dynamics, behavioral economics, motivational psychology, UX/UI (User Experience and User Interface), neurobiology, technology platforms, as well as ROI-driving business implementations. This book explores the interplay between these disciplines to capture the core principles that contribute to good gamification design. 

This book aims to become a strategy guide to help readers master the games that truly make a difference in their lives. Readers who absorb this book's contents will have literally obtained what many companies pay tens of thousands of dollars to acquire. The ultimate aim is to enable the widespread adoption of good gamification and human-focused design in all types of industries.

Get your copy here. 

E) Interviewing Users: How to uncover Compelling Insights

Interviewing is a foundational user research tool that people assume they already possess. Everyone can ask questions, right? Unfortunately, that's not the case. Interviewing Users provides invaluable interviewing techniques and tools that enable you to conduct informative interviews with anyone. You'll move from simply gathering data to uncovering powerful insights about people.

Interviewing Users will explain how to succeed with interviewing, including:

• Embracing how other people see the world
• Building rapport to create engaging and exciting interactions
• Listening to build rapport.

Steve Portigal uses stories and examples from his 15 years of experience to show how interviewing can be incorporated into the design process. It helps you learn the best and right information to inform and inspire your design.

Get your copy here. 

F) Impact Mapping: Making a Big Impact With Software Products and Projects

Software is everywhere today, but countless software products and projects die a slow death without ever making any impact. The result is a tremendous amount of time and money wasted due to wrong assumptions, lack of focus, poor communication of objectives, lack of understanding, and misalignment with overall goals. There has to be a better way to deliver! This handbook is a practical guide to impact mapping, a simple yet incredibly effective method for collaborative strategic planning that helps organizations make an impact with software. 

Impact mapping helps create better plans and roadmaps that ensure business and delivery alignment and are easily adaptable to change. Impact mapping fits nicely into several current software product management and releases planning trends. It includes goal-oriented requirements engineering, frequent iterative delivery, agile and lean software methods, lean startup product development cycles, and design thinking. 

Gojko Adzic is a strategic software delivery consultant who works with ambitious teams to improve their software products and processes. Gojko won the 2012 Jolt Award for the best book.

Get your copy here. 

G)Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams

Lean UX has become the preferred approach to interaction design, tailor-made for today's agile teams. In this book, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden expand on the valuable Lean UX principles, tactics, and techniques. It helps share how product teams can easily incorporate design, experimentation, iteration, and continuous learning from real users into their Agile process.

Inspired by Lean and Agile development theories, Lean UX lets you focus on the actual experience being designed rather than deliverables. This book shows you how to collaborate closely with other members of your Agile product team and gather feedback early and often. You'll learn how to drive the design in short, iterative cycles to assess what works best for the business and the user. Lean UX shows you how to make this change—for the better. 

• Frame a vision of the problem you're solving and focus your team on the right outcomes
• Bring the designers' toolkit to the rest of your product team
• Share your insights with your team much earlier in the process
• Create Minimum Viable Products to determine which ideas are valid
• Incorporate the voice of the customer throughout the project cycle
• Make your team more productive: combine Lean UX with Agile's Scrum framework
• Understand the organizational shifts necessary to integrate Lean UX

Get your copy here. 

H) Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want

Value Proposition Design helps you tackle every business's core challenge — creating compelling products and services customers want to buy. This highly practical book, paired with its online companion, will teach you the processes and tools you need to create products that sell. This book is a sequel to "Business Model Generation," which explains how to use the "Value Proposition Canvas" to design, test, create, and manage products and services customers actually want.

Value Proposition Design is for those who get frustrated by new product meetings based on hunches and intuitions. It's for anyone who has watched an expensive new product launch fail in the market. The book will help you understand the patterns of great value propositions, get closer to customers, and avoid wasting time with ideas that won't work. You'll learn the simple design process and test value propositions that perfectly match customers' needs and desires.

Besides, the book gives you exclusive access to an online companion on Strategyzer.com. You will be able to assess your work, learn from peers, download pdf checklists, and more. Value Proposition Design is an essential companion to the" Business Model Canvas" from Business Model Generation. Value Proposition Design gives you a proven methodology for success, with value propositions that sell, embedded in profitable business models."

Get your copy here. 

Happy Reading!

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