Best Product Design Books
(Updated 2024)
March 4, 2023In the context of books for founders and entrepreneurs and business management books, in this article you will find the best books on how to design and develop products that attract and keep the attention of customers.
You can then read about how to get these products to buyers in books on digits marketing, for example.
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
by Nir Eyal
Why are services such as e-mail, WhatsApp, or Instagram so popular that many can no longer imagine everyday life without them?
How can entrepreneurs design products so that they attract and retain the attention of their customers - without costly advertising - until they use them out of sheer habit?
Nir Eyal, lecturer, investor, and expert in consumer psychology, has systematically explored these questions. The result is the "Hook Model" - a cyclic process consisting of the following four phases:
- Trigger: First external (e.g., an e-mail or a notification), later internal (e.g., boredom) triggers lead to action.
- Action: This must require as little effort as possible, i.e., the product must be as intuitive to use as possible.
- Variable reward: Rewards should vary (e.g., news and feedback from friends, progress indicators) and motivate to continue using the product.
- Investment: The more time and effort users invest in a product (e.g., progress in a game, tracked activity in sports apps, their timeline in social networks), the harder it will be for them to part with the product or replace it with another.
The book contains numerous illustrative examples - from social media to Bible apps. It reads smoothly and includes a summary of the key findings at the end of each chapter, as well as practical checklists for applying the theory to your products.
Ethical issues are also addressed, albeit somewhat superficially ("Only develop products that improve people's lives and that you would use yourself").
A recommendation for entrepreneurs, product managers, designers, and anyone who wants to develop products that excite their customers enough to integrate them into their everyday lives.
Suitable as an audiobook? Yes.
Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
by Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, David S. Duncan
Similar to "Nail It Then Scale It," this book deals with how successful innovation can be systematically planned so that customers are willing to pay premium prices for the products and services offered.
However, the focus in this book is not on the product development process itself, but on why customers spend money on specific products and services.
The answer is to be found in the so-called "jobs to be done" theory: customers do not buy products and services; instead, they hire them to do a particular job.
One product can be used for a variety of jobs: a daily newspaper, for example, provides information, covers waiting times, helps people find a job, offers relaxation after work – all tasks for which completely different products can be used today. Likewise, different products can be used for the same job: For relaxation after work, I can hire Netflix, my smartphone, family, and friends.
To succeed with innovation, an entrepreneur must understand what job his product does for the customer. Otherwise, he risks being taken over by a competitor with a product that does the job better.
The book explains the theory and its application in practice with numerous vivid and convincing examples, which makes the book very entertaining and worth reading.
Suitable as an audiobook? Yes.
Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value
by Melissa Perri
Author Melissa Perri uses the term “build trap” to describe the state in which companies maximize output – the number of features delivered per time – with many of these features offering no real benefit to customers instead of focusing on outcome, i.e., developing products that provide real added value for customers.
In “Escaping The Build Trap,” the author describes strategies that companies can use to avoid excessive feature development and instead develop a sustainable product strategy that focuses on satisfying customer needs, adapting to changing market conditions, and ensuring the company’s long-term competitiveness.
These strategies include experimenting with real users, observing customer behavior, interacting with customers, collecting and analyzing data on product usage, and continuously improving the product and the product development process through repetitive iterations. The author also introduces concepts such as lean product management, agile development, and user-centered design.
Responsibility for product development lies with Product Management. Accordingly, the author also presents strategies for building a product team and creating a product and communication culture within the organization.
The book is easy to read and contains numerous practical and inspiring case studies, valuable insights into the author’s work, and directly applicable tips for designing customer-oriented product development.
It’s a must-read for all product managers, executives, designers, and software developers committed to a customer-oriented approach.
Suitable as an audiobook? Yes.
Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It)
by William Poundstone
What prices are people willing to pay? Even as a computer science student, I had to learn about supply and demand curves in my basic economics course. These are based on the assumption that humans, as "homo economicus", always decide rationally.
Countless studies in recent decades have disproved this approach. Humans act highly emotionally. Numerous psychological factors influence the prices people are willing to pay.
For example, take the "anchoring" bias: people are exposed to a (usually very high) price before a purchasing decision. The higher this "anchor", the higher prices a buyer considers appropriate. Every supermarket exploits this effect: The most expensive wines are not presented because they are often bought – but because they pull up the price that customers find acceptable for mid-range wines.
This book is a collection of reviews of academic studies on price psychology, with exciting and often surprising findings, complemented by entertaining anecdotes from the lives of the psychologists and economists who conducted them.
The results are not only interesting for people who have to set prices, but also for us consumers. In our day-to-day confrontation with prices and purchasing decisions, it gives us a chance to reflect on the psychological tricks that have led us to believe that the price we are willing to pay is reasonable.
Suitable as an audiobook? The title is currently not available as an audiobook – should that change, it would be suitable as such.
Every Page Is Page One: Topic-Based Writing for Technical Communication and the Web
by Mark Baker
The Internet has changed the way people search for and consume content. The term “Every Page is Page One,” coined by the author Mark Baker, describes the fact that all websites found via search engines are the first page a reader finds for their search term. The reader expects such a page to contain all the information required to understand the topic at a certain level of abstraction – without having to “flip” to previous or subsequent pages.
By linking to lower levels of abstraction, the reader can delve into details; by linking to higher levels of abstraction, they can zoom out to an overarching subject area.
Nowadays, nobody wants to read a several hundred-page manual to learn how to configure a video camera’s autofocus. People expect to enter the term “autofocus” and their camera model into a search engine and be taken to a page that answers their question—no more, no less.
And it is precisely this new way of consuming information that you should consider when producing content for the web if you don’t want to alienate your readers. Every website should be designed and written as an independent, self-contained unit and be richly linked to related topics. This applies to encyclopaedias such as Wikipedia as well as blogs and product documentation.
The book uses numerous examples to show precisely how “Every Page is Page One” content should be structured so that readers can benefit most.
I recommend the book to anyone who creates content for the Internet – at least the first two-thirds. After that, the author repeats himself quite often and digresses into related topics such as minimalism, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), and tools for content creation.
Suitable as an audiobook? No, due to numerous illustrations.