A few years ago I started to feel like I hit a wall with what’s interesting about UX. The content that is constantly published is very shallow (users need high contrast text, green is go and red is stop!) and is a regurgitation of the exact same Silicon Valley startup cases. This all changed when I decided to get off the blogs and digging into books that aren’t recommended by all the influencers. I came across Stephen Anderson & Karl Fast’s book, “Figure It Out,” which gave me an accessible insight into cognitive science while still respecting my intelligence.
It has gems like this concept called “epistemic actions” – which are behaviors that seem to have no clear value but facilitate thinking. For example, when playing chess, beginners often touch pieces without moving them, or when reading on a screen, we sometimes highlight text with our cursor even though we have no intention of copying it. These aren’t errors or wasted motions – they’re actually part of our cognitive process. It gave me language for explaining why users hover over buttons they never intend to click—and though this doesn’t have an immediate ROI, it deepened what I think of “worth designing” as an interaction.
What’s particularly interesting is how this book and others in its category bridge physical and digital interactions. The book sits at this perfect intersection between cognitive science, neuroscience, and UX design, but approaches it from real-world behavior rather than either purely theoretical or purely digital “tactics” to improve clickthrough rates.
Chapter 11, which is available for free on the UX Matters blog, was particularly insightful. I love the conceptual framework of how humans find, process, and act on information.
I also just picked up “A Meaning Processing Approach to Cognition” by John Flach and Fred Voorhorst from the library, which seems to complement these ideas through ecological psychology and affordances (building on Gibson’s work that Norman later brought to UX).
The deeper I go into cognitive science, the more I realize how much of our “intuitive” design decisions does have a language that designers are rarely trained in. Understanding these cognitive processes has started changing how I approach design problems – moving beyond just “what works” to “why it works.”
I recently recorded a podcast with my business partner where we shared design books that impacted us, and we tried to make it a blend of classics and lesser known books. It has been surprisingly difficult to find more books in this category.
A thoughtful professor and friend of mine gave me the list of books he explored in his education and masters years before. I’d heard of almost none of these but here is the list in case any of you are interested:
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“Mindstorms” by Papert (1980)
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“Things That Make Us Smart” by Don Norman (1993)
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“Thought and Language” by Vygotsky (1965)
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“Tools for Conviviality” by Ivan Illich (1973)
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“Understanding Computers and Cognition” by Winograd and Flores (1987)
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“Designs for the Pluriverse” by Escobar (2018)
I’m curious – has anyone else found accessible, and design-specific/adjacent cognitive science content for their UX work? What books or research have influenced your understanding of how users actually think about and interact with software beyond the tactics?
