The craft references for people making the design decisions, from first principles to the pattern library.
This list is for people who make design decisions rather than review them. It opens with the two books that change how you look at any interface, moves through interaction design, information architecture and the psychology behind common patterns, and ends with the practices that hold a design together across a team and a codebase. Read the first two in a week and reach for the rest as the work demands.
Affordances, signifiers, mapping and feedback, plus the argument that most so called user error is design error. Every other book here assumes you have absorbed it.
Krug on scanning rather than reading, conventions worth keeping, and the trunk test for orientation. Short enough to finish in an evening and usable the next morning.
Cooper and colleagues on goal directed design, personas and scenarios, followed by a long catalogue of interface idioms covering controls, navigation, errors and data entry. This is the reference to open when you want a considered answer rather than a quick one.
Yablonski gives you the reason behind a decision you already sense is right, covering Fitts's law, Hick's law, Jakob's law and the peak end rule. In a design review a named principle carries further than a hunch.
The standard reference on organisation, labelling, navigation and search, rewritten so it applies to any information environment rather than only to websites. Read it when people cannot find things and adding a search box has not helped.
Covert on language, and on why one ambiguous word in a navigation bar causes so much confusion downstream. A few pages per chapter with an exercise at the end of each, so it works as a warm up before a heavier book.
Gothelf and Seiden on running design inside a delivery cadence rather than upstream of it, with assumptions made explicit and turned into hypotheses. The book for the situation where design keeps arriving late and arriving finished.
Kholmatova treats a system as a shared language and spends the first half on the decisions, covering principles, functional and perceptual patterns, and how strict the system ought to be. Read it before anyone chooses tooling.
Frost's vocabulary of atoms, molecules, organisms, templates and pages, now used well beyond the original method. The chapter on maintaining a system once it exists covers the stage where most of them come apart.
The meeting after the work is done, where a design is either accepted or reopened. Greever gives you a way to connect a choice back to an agreed objective, plus answers for the objections that recur.