Strategy, discovery, metrics, growth, pricing, design, delivery and leadership. Each entry says when it is the right one to pick up.
Winters established the content design practice at the UK Government Digital Service, and this book sets out the method. Content design starts from a user need and from evidence about what people actually search for, then answers …
Torres describes a specific weekly cadence. You interview customers every week, map the space with an opportunity solution tree, and run small assumption tests against the ideas that tree produces.
Hansen wrote this after several thousand customer interviews conducted while bootstrapping a software business, and it is the most practical book available on the mechanics of the conversation itself.
The thorough guide to planning and running usability tests, written by two people who have run a great many of them. The first part covers what usability is and where testing fits alongside other methods, and the second walks …
Portigal's book on the craft of the interview itself. Covers preparation and recruiting, building rapport, the structure of a good interview guide, and the specific techniques of silence, follow up and asking for stories.
Hall's guide to doing research yourself rather than outsourcing it. Covers the research basics of asking answerable questions and avoiding bias, then works through organisational research, user research, competitive research, evaluative research and analysis.
Alvarez wrote a practical guide to customer development for people inside established companies rather than for founders, which is the gap the original literature left.
Young's method for building a large diagram of what people are trying to accomplish, drawn from transcripts of open ended interviews and grouped into towers of related tasks, thoughts and feelings.
Goodman, Kuniavsky and Moed produced the standard reference on user research methods, running to six hundred pages and covering interviews, surveys, diary studies, usability testing, card sorting, ethnographic fieldwork and analytics, with the strengths and the cost of each.
Young separates empathy as a research skill from sympathy and from simply being pleasant, and explains how to build a real understanding of how another person thinks.
A statistics book aimed squarely at people who run user research, organised around the questions that actually come up in the work. It covers confidence intervals for completion rates and task times, comparing two designs, sample …
Krug wrote the follow up to Don't Make Me Think about the one activity he believes teams should do and mostly do not, which is watching somebody use the thing.
Constable wrote eighty eight pages on the qualitative half of customer development, with a foreword by Steve Blank and cartoons by Tom Fishburne. It covers who to talk to, how to find them, how to structure the conversation, how …
Spiegelhalter frames statistics as the practice of turning a real question into data and back into an answer, using a problem solving cycle as the spine of the book.
IDEO.org's guide to human centred design, written for people designing with communities rather than for consumer software, and useful well beyond that setting.