Top Product Design books curated by experts

LEGO® bricks are design icons and marvels of engineering. Having remained virtually unchanged for over fifty years, the brick is still the center of the LEGO System in Play, in which each brick connects to every other brick, allowing the construction of almost anything you can imagine. LEGO mini…

Since Don’t Make Me Think was first published in 2000, hundreds of thousands of Web designers and developers have relied on usability guru Steve Krug’s guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design. Witty, commonsensical, and eminently practical, it’…

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—a four-step process embedded i…

The Zombie Apocalypse Guide to 3D printing is written for the person who wants to use their printer to make practical, durable items for everyday use.Whether rebuilding civilization from your jungle hideaway, fighting off zombie hordes, or just printing a new plastic bit for your latest project,…

Embrace Open Engineering and accelerate the design and manufacturing processes. Product development is a team sport, but most companies don't practice it that way. Organizations should be drawing on the creativity of engaged customers and outsiders, but instead they rely on the same small group …

In User Friendly, Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant reveal the untold story of a paradigm that quietly rules our modern lives: the assumption that machines should anticipate what we need. Spanning over a century of sweeping changes, from women’s rights to the Great Depression to World War II to t…

The fault, argues this ingenious -- even liberating -- book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, c…

Our phones, computers, and appliances are made of hundreds of internal components, each precisely engineered to perform a certain function, but none intended to actually be seen. Through painstakingly executed, vividly detailed cross-section photography, Open Circuits reveals the surprising—and …

In this lively and entertaining work, Witold Rybczynski―hailed as “one of the best writers on design working today” by Publishers Weekly―tells the story of the most distinctive cars in history and the artists, engineers, dreamers, and gearheads who created them. Delving into more than 170 years …

Ten laws of simplicity for business, technology, and design that teach us how to need less but get more. Finally, we are learning that simplicity equals sanity. We're rebelling against technology that's too complicated, DVD players with too many menus, and software accompanied by 75-megabyte "re…