I am putting together a comprehensive list of UX books that will be available in the next couple weeks.

Some of my favourites are:

• The Elements of User Experience by Jesse-James Garret - great overview of what makes a great UX

• Undercover User Experience Design by Cennydd Bowles - practical companion to the Elements, showing you common methods and best practices that lead to great UX design

• Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter - human side of design

• Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design by Bill Buxton - its not about sketching per se, more about design process in general. Not as practical as all the books above, but still a great read

And probably surprisingly to many User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton. Great book overall, but especially useful if you are working in Agile environment. It will show you how building the Story map covers most of the ground that other traditional methods cover: e.g. personas and customer journey maps.

It is very solid framework for thinking about UX of a product. Embrace it. I've been going through other UX books that talk about design process, and most of them follow the same progression as the Elements.

Take a look at The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garret. You don't have to read the book, but study the diagram: http://www.jjg.net/elements/pdf/elements.pdf. It will uncover some concrete things about what is behind the surface, like: user needs, business objectives. Those are the foundation of good UX.

The book will explain those concepts in more details, and provide some foundation to build upon, but it does little in terms of practical help. For that I recommend you check out https://hackdesign.org/ . It is free and curated list of resources for learning design.

Ping me on Twitter (@twelvedesign) if you have more question or need more definite direction.

Nice. Thank you!

I see it as a good way to sharpen visual design skills, not necessarily UX skills. With later you have to invest much more time in figuring out the problem, and the best way to solve it on the surface (in the UI). This is not something I can afford doing everyday in my spare time. Especially because most of my thinking UX thinking energy is drained during regular working hours.