Here are 36 books that Usability Testing Essentials fans have personally recommended if you like
Usability Testing Essentials.
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There is a scene in the 1960 movie adaptation of The Time Traveler by HG Wells where the protagonist goes rapidly into the future as he watches a whole city spin into existence around him. That’s how I feel about my career. I started in 1994 and have watched UX grow into an incredible field! I’ve run my own business since 2008 focused exclusively on qualitative research consulting while also doing all sorts of exciting thought leadership activities – from writing to speaking to creating a number of courses on LinkedIn Learning – and I love to build my UX network too! I live in Silver Spring, Maryland.
One thing that I’ve seen happen is that UX professionals and aspiring UX professionals focus intensively on learning the methods needed to practice UX to the detriment of focusing on learning necessary soft skills.
There is a whole category of books that, while not UX specific, talk about how to practice those soft skills. This book is one of my favorites – it explains the value of building your network and relationships towards professional success.
Those relationships are really one of the keys to career success as a UX professional.
The bestselling business classic on the power of relationships, updated with in-depth advice for making connections in the digital world.
Do you want to get ahead in life? Climb the ladder to personal success?
The secret, master networker Keith Ferrazzi claims, is in reaching out to other people. As Ferrazzi discovered in early life, what distinguishes highly successful people from everyone else is the way they use the power of relationships—so that everyone wins.
In Never Eat Alone, Ferrazzi lays out the specific steps—and inner mindset—he uses to reach out to connect with the thousands of colleagues, friends, and associates…
There is a scene in the 1960 movie adaptation of The Time Traveler by HG Wells where the protagonist goes rapidly into the future as he watches a whole city spin into existence around him. That’s how I feel about my career. I started in 1994 and have watched UX grow into an incredible field! I’ve run my own business since 2008 focused exclusively on qualitative research consulting while also doing all sorts of exciting thought leadership activities – from writing to speaking to creating a number of courses on LinkedIn Learning – and I love to build my UX network too! I live in Silver Spring, Maryland.
This is an extremely comprehensive overview of most aspects of User Experience (UX).
It’s the kind of book that you may never read from cover to cover (it’s over 800 pages!) but it’s exactly what I’ve appreciated having on my bookshelf when I need a quick how-to overview of a specific design or research method.
The discipline of user experience (UX) design has matured into a confident practice and this edition reflects, and in some areas accelerates, that evolution. Technically this is the second edition of The UX Book, but so much of it is new, it is more like a sequel.
One of the major positive trends in UX is the continued emphasis on design-a kind of design that highlights the designer's creative skills and insights and embodies a synthesis of technology with usability, usefulness, aesthetics, and meaningfulness to the user. In this edition a new conceptual top-down design framework is introduced to help…
There is a scene in the 1960 movie adaptation of The Time Traveler by HG Wells where the protagonist goes rapidly into the future as he watches a whole city spin into existence around him. That’s how I feel about my career. I started in 1994 and have watched UX grow into an incredible field! I’ve run my own business since 2008 focused exclusively on qualitative research consulting while also doing all sorts of exciting thought leadership activities – from writing to speaking to creating a number of courses on LinkedIn Learning – and I love to build my UX network too! I live in Silver Spring, Maryland.
There are a whole host of books about UX methods, but in our world of ever-advancing technology, there are few books that are really up to date with how to practice UX when the medium is no longer one-dimensional or even a physical product.
As AR and VR experiences are becoming more and more normal, I’ve appreciated being able to read a book that really captures the most recent evolution of UX methods towards a new virtual world of possibilities.
1. Provides a toolkit of templates for common VR interactions, as well as practical advice on when to use them and how to tailor them for specific use cases; 2. Includes case studies detailing the practical application of interaction theory discussed in each chapter; 3. Presents tables of guidelines for practicing VR developers, for reference during software development; 4. Covers procedures for Interface Evaluation - formulas and testing methodologies to ensure that VR interfaces are effective, efficient, engaging, error-tolerant, and easy to learn; 5. Non-linear organisation - chapters of the book on different concepts can be read to gain knowledge…
There is a scene in the 1960 movie adaptation of The Time Traveler by HG Wells where the protagonist goes rapidly into the future as he watches a whole city spin into existence around him. That’s how I feel about my career. I started in 1994 and have watched UX grow into an incredible field! I’ve run my own business since 2008 focused exclusively on qualitative research consulting while also doing all sorts of exciting thought leadership activities – from writing to speaking to creating a number of courses on LinkedIn Learning – and I love to build my UX network too! I live in Silver Spring, Maryland.
As a UX researcher myself, I love how this book explains UX research methods simply and clearly.
I appreciate how it presents everything within a rich background of context and history. For me, this is the book I go to when I need to figure out how to best explain some research approach to a client.
I also appreciate how it also includes sections on myths and incorrect ideas which helps me when I sometimes need to explain to a client why their approach may need to be adjusted to be more methodologically correct.
Finally, I think this is a great book for UX designers to understand when and how to involve research in their efforts.
Think Like a UX Researcher will challenge your preconceptions about user experience (UX) research and encourage you to think beyond the obvious. You'll discover how to plan and conduct UX research, analyze data, persuade teams to take action on the results and build a career in UX. The book will help you take a more strategic view of product design so you can focus on optimizing the user's experience. UX Researchers, Designers, Project Managers, Scrum Masters, Business Analysts and Marketing Managers will find tools, inspiration and ideas to rejuvenate their thinking, inspire their team and improve their craft.
I have been coding for over 30 years. I’ve seen some miserable interfaces, and some large programs that collapse under their own weight. Software was, at one point, notorious for being late, over budget, and unreliable. These books have helped turn the corner on these failings, and I have found each of them very valuable in my day-to-day programming. While you can learn technique and even languages online, the kind of insight found in these books is rare and worth spending time and money on.
There are literally dozens of good books on unit testing, but I highly recommend reading at least one. Unit testing is one of the most important practices that a great many programmers do not do. It isn’t easy, once you get past tiny programs, but it is absolutely essential if you wish to create robust code. Without unit testing you fix one thing over here, and break it over there. With good unit testing you know that your program will be flexible and easily evolved.
Unit Testing: Principles, Patterns and Practices shows you how to refine your existing unit tests by implementing modern best practices. You'll learn to spot which tests are performing, which need refactoring, and which need to be deleted entirely! Upgrade your testing suite with new testing styles, good patterns, and reliable automated testing.
Unit Testing: Principles, Practices and Patterns is a practical guide to modern unit testing best practices. Microsoft MVP Vladimir Khorikov takes you hands-on with examples of the ideal unit test and unit testing practices, building your skills step by step on a solid foundation.
My passion for developing production-ready, cooperating microservices began in 2008 when I first started assisting customers in creating distributed systems—long before the term “microservices” was coined. During that time, I faced significant challenges, including grappling with the “Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing”. Since then, I’ve dedicated most of my career to deepening my understanding of these complexities and finding ways to address them through robust architecture, design patterns, and the right tools.
A common reason for microservice projects to fail is a lack of understanding of how to build resilient and fault-tolerant microservices.
This book was a game-changer for me, providing essential strategies to address these challenges. It taught me how to avoid anti-patterns like Cascading Failures and embrace patterns like Circuit Breaker and Bulkhead to manage temporary network issues and overload situations. The real-world solutions it offers were immediately applicable to my projects.
A single dramatic software failure can cost a company millions of dollars - but can be avoided with simple changes to design and architecture. This new edition of the best-selling industry standard shows you how to create systems that run longer, with fewer failures, and recover better when bad things happen. New coverage includes DevOps, microservices, and cloud-native architecture. Stability antipatterns have grown to include systemic problems in large-scale systems. This is a must-have pragmatic guide to engineering for production systems. If you're a software developer, and you don't want to get alerts every night for the rest of your…
I’ve spent more than a decade working on infrastructure, from my early days at LinkedIn, where we had to do a massive DevOps transformation to save the company, to co-founding Gruntwork, where I had the opportunity to work with hundreds of companies on their software delivery practices. From all of this, I can say the following with certainty: the DevOps best practices that a handful of the top tech companies have figured out are not filtering down to the rest of the industry. This is making the entire software industry slower, less effective, and less secure—and I see it as my mission to fix that.
This is one of those books that changed how I thought about and approached software development. First, the book addressed the pain points that I had run into so often: the problems with infrequent, manual deployments, the outages caused by changing configuration rather than source code, the nightmare of merge conflicts that you get from long-lived feature branches, and so on.
Then, it showed how to flip the typical software development process on its head through CI / CD, changing the default from “our software is broken, and we need an integration and release process to get it working” to “our software is always working, and we can release it at any time.” Once I read it, I could never go back to the old way.
Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process.This groundbreaking new book sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers, and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours-sometimes even minutes-no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base.
Jez Humble and David Farley begin by presenting the foundations of a rapid,…
I’m a professional software developer for more than 22 years now. I’ve used many programming languages, platforms, frameworks, etc. throughout my career. However, the only constant for me personally was the practice of Test-Driven Development. I’ve never stopped learning about the principles and practices behind it, and it paid huge dividends throughout my career. I’m very humbled and grateful to be able to learn from all those amazing people over the years, that I decided to write a book on the topic. Giving back some of the knowledge that I gathered about TDD throughout 18+ years.
I must admit that the first time I read this book, it completely didn’t resonate with me. Sure, I picked up a couple of very important concepts here and there. One of those concepts is the “Test Data Builder”. However, some of the techniques I completely rejected. It took me a couple of years to start opening up to the practices described in this book. After a second read, I came to the conclusion that this excellent work deserved more credit. That’s why I added it to this list. This book shaped my entire thinking around Outside-In TDD, which is a very important approach to guiding well-designed software systems.
"The authors of this book have led a revolution in the craft of programming by controlling the environment in which software grows." --Ward Cunningham
"At last, a book suffused with code that exposes the deep symbiosis between TDD and OOD. This one's a keeper." --Robert C. Martin
"If you want to be an expert in the state of the art in TDD, you need to understand the ideas in this book."--Michael Feathers
Test-Driven Development (TDD) is now an established technique for delivering better software faster. TDD is based on a simple idea: Write tests for your…
I’m a professional software developer for more than 22 years now. I’ve used many programming languages, platforms, frameworks, etc. throughout my career. However, the only constant for me personally was the practice of Test-Driven Development. I’ve never stopped learning about the principles and practices behind it, and it paid huge dividends throughout my career. I’m very humbled and grateful to be able to learn from all those amazing people over the years, that I decided to write a book on the topic. Giving back some of the knowledge that I gathered about TDD throughout 18+ years.
This is the most complete and exhaustive reference book when it comes to test automation. It’s a massive book that’s got pretty much all bases covered: test patterns, test strategies, test smells, test practices, etc. … It’s all there. If you want to get a feel about what’s covered, check out the xUnit Test Patterns website. This book provides all the information to become an expert at all kinds of automated tests. It requires a lot of effort to process the content, but it’s definitely all worth it!
Software testing has received renewed attention with the widespread adoption of Extreme Programming and other agile methodologies. While testing does not directly improve the quality of software, the under-appreciated practice provides a timely and accurate measurement (a reality check) so that the reader knows whether any new action needs to be taken. Automated software testing is used to ensure that once the software works, it is not accidentally broken during subsequent software development or maintenance activities. This book describes patterns for writing automated tests using the XUnit family (e.g., JUnit and NUnit) of test automation frameworks. The author uses the…
Since I was a kid, I’ve been passionate about technology and had a clear vocation to work with computers. I’ve been a developer for more than 20 years now, spending half of them mainly in the Python environment, and I’ve always been interested in improving my skills. While it’s true that software development is a field that changes constantly and technology evolves at great speed, there are some elements that remain relatively unchanged and can be used to compound knowledge and ability. In particular, the elements that are closer to the human element, teamwork, coordination, etc. are quite stable over time.
While this is a Python-specific book, it’s a fantastic description of all the possibilities for testing with a powerful module like Pytest offers. Testing is one of the basic experiences for a programmer, as it should be included as a core part of the development process. Understanding all the different options available like mark groups of tests, parametric tests, building your own extensions, or test coverage, to name only a few details, expands the understanding of how to design better tests and run them more efficiently.
Do less work when testing your Python code, but be just as expressive, just as elegant, and just as readable. The pytest testing framework helps you write tests quickly and keep them readable and maintainable - with no boilerplate code. Using a robust yet simple fixture model, it's just as easy to write small tests with pytest as it is to scale up to complex functional testing for applications, packages, and libraries. This book shows you how. For Python-based projects, pytest is the undeniable choice to test your code if you're looking for a full-featured, API-independent, flexible, and extensible testing…
