Digital interfaces rely on common visual design tools to communicate – layout, type, color, and imagery, along with controls and affordances. The book Visual Usability: Principles and Practices for Designing Digital Applications provides a common language for defining and evaluating visual user interfaces that's grounded in how people perceive and interpret what they see.

With these guidelines you get a very extensive and detailed reference library that you can base your own graphical user interface on.

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The Material Design framework offers a lot a basic design principles that tap deep into how humans can be supported in easily understanding graphical user interfaces and events in them.

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With this book you get a nice broad introduction to some of the best psychological theory out there. It will help you steer clear of your own misunderstandings and general folk psychological assumptions. In general, I recommend everything that Pinker writes. You can start out by watching one of his many online lectures.

With this book you get a good understanding of the basic ways in which humans interact with the world. This will provide you with a strong foundation to base your design analysis and development on.

The number sense provides an oveview of basic human cognitive skills (level 1 in the levels of cognition model). It is a must read for anyone who makes technology where numbers is a key component (e.g., finance, measurement). Also, it provides an introduction to the relationship between basic cognitive skills (level 1) and higher order cognitive skills (level 3 and 4).

Very comprehensive human factors expert design guide. With more than 450 pages, this is a key reference book for how to design user interfaces that build on knowledge of human capabilities and limitations.

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This is a classic. Lakoff and Johnson was part of the founding of a branch of psychology that sees perception, brain processes, and behaviour as embodied. That makes a huge difference to design. Getting people right is a first step to getting design right.

This book is a more general extension of The Number Sense by Stanislas Dehane. It introduces additional details to how our basic cognitive functions work (level 1). It provides valuable insights to the general functions of level 1. Especially, chapter one and two are must reads that introduce basic level capabilities related to space and objects - and how those influence higher order cognitive functions.

Affordance is a widely used term in design - and a widely misunderstood term. This article is on the theoretical side but will steer you in the right direction using affordance as a design tool.

This article goes nicely with the Interaction Frogger article by Wensveen, Djajadiningrat & Overbeeke (2004).

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The illusion of life tells the story of how to recreate the basic visual properties that humans rely on to make sense of behaviour in the world. It took Disney and his teams careful exploration to learn this language. The animation principles are the cornerstone of how the iPhone makes sense even to very small children.

John Lasseter played a key role in bridging the Walt Disney Animation principles into the graphical user interfaces of the iPod and the iPhone thanks to his collaboration with Steve Jobs. This article shares his ideas on 3D animation principles.

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This book is very hard to read - but worth the effort if you are interested in the fundamental workings of our perceptual systems. It is the scientific story behind why even children can master tablets and smartphones. The book provides you with a mindset for thinking differently about how human beings function. However, there are no concrete tools to use - it is base science. As a pragmatic alternative read “The Illusion of Life” by Walt Disney.

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In this accessible and informative book, Kathryn Best brings together the theory and practice of design management. With new interviews, case studies and related exercises, she provides an up to date guide for students wanting to know more about the strategy, process and implementation crucial to the management of design.

Value Proposition Design is for anyone who has been 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 process of designing and testing value propositions, that perfectly match customers’ needs and desires.

This paper is a super practical resource for getting started writing usability requirements. Although relatively straightforward, many companies struggle defining usability requirements beyond broad-level “Easy to use” and “Intuitive”. These are just headlines that tell you nothing unless you detail them. This article will show you how. A must read for any UX lead and project owner. Also, consider pitching this to marketing - they may be inspired to pursue a new type of claims and selling points!

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