Books from Women Talk Design Speakers
It’s important that we pay attention not just to who we see on stage, but to whose ideas and stories we read.
We have some good news: Women Talk Design community members are not just brilliant speakers, they are also brilliant writers. We’ve started to curate a list of a few of their books below.
Are you a woman or nonbinary person in the WTD community with a book to add to the list? Email contact@womentalkdesign.com.
*This list is currently organized alphabetically by the author’s last name.
The Essential Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas
by Tamara Aldin
The Essential Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas offers a practical guide to the creation and use of personas, which can help product designers, their team, and their organization become more user focused.
This E-Book will educate you on technique, style, and proper management on how to do your makeup. It will also reveal beauty tips and tricks that are not typically available to those who are on the go.
Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap
In an actionable framework focused on voice, volume, and vulnerability, this book will teach you how to employ concrete tactics to help your brand regain trust, respect, and customer loyalty.
Equity: How to Design Organizations Where Everyone Thrives
Filled with humor, heart, and pragmatism, Equity is a guidebook for change, answering the question of “how?” that so many leaders are asking today.
by Abby Covert
If you have never made a diagram in your life or feel under-skilled in this area, this book is for you. Build your confidence both in the process and with the outcomes to expect from diagramming.
What CEOs Need to Know About Design
by Audrey Crane
As a leader, you’ve heard that design is important, and you believe it. But you may not know what you need to know about it, how to buy it, and how to manage it. This is the book for you.
Conversations with Things: UX Design for Chat and Voice
by Diana Deibel and Rebecca Evanhoe
Conversations with Things teaches you how to design conversations that are useful, ethical, and human-centered—because everyone deserves to be understood, especially you.
Engineering Management for the Rest of Us
The book goes from the macro to the micro- with topics ranging everywhere from “feedback” to “scoping down PRs”.
The Human Centered Brand: A Practical Guide to Being Yourself in Business
by Nela Dunato
This comprehensive branding book for service based businesses & creatives helps you grow meaningful relationships with your clients and your audience.
From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice
From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice is your blueprint for creating a scalable, UX-focused content strategy practice–one that demonstrates the value that a robust practice brings to your organization, and to the creation of engaging digital experiences.
Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Design
The Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Design considers the design, not only of artifacts, but of structures, systems, and interactions that bear our decisions and identities in the context of sustaining our shared planet.
Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make–and Keep–Friends
Platonic provides a clear and actionable blueprint for forging strong, lasting connections with others—and for becoming our happiest, most fulfilled selves in the process.
The One & Done Cookbook: 87+ plant-based dinners for easy weeknight cooking
Betsy, a full-time product designer, is used to thinking about more seamless ways for people to interact with the world. She decided to apply that same thinking to cooking to see if she could make it more appealing for people too busy to cook. The result is a collection of vegan and vegetarian dinners that are low-fuss, low-mess, and high in protein.
Rants & Ramblings: On Life and Wellness
Enjoy fresh perspective and potential solutions to a variety of issues that can easily become insurmountable stumbling blocks, delivered in relatable, easy-to-follow prose that will have you turning page after page of this illuminating guide until you all-to-quickly reach the end.
This book is a manual and toolkit to help people to not only reclaim their creativity and productivity, but bump it up to extreme productivity, clearing a path for everyone to find their zone more often – and stay in it longer.
Whether you’re a student, educator, practicing designer, manager, recruiter, mentor, or organizer, you’ll learn to notice subconscious bias, interrogate your values, and actively create welcoming spaces for all. Inclusive Design Communities will empower you to build the design industry you want to see—the one we all deserve.
Game Thinking: Innovate Smarter & Drive Deep Engagement with Design Techniques from Hit Games
by Amy Jo Kim
In this groundbreaking book, Amy Jo Kim lays out a step-by-step system for accelerating innovation, and crafting products that people love…and keep loving.
Sound is Not Enough: The Art of Captioning for Universal Access (second edition)
Svetlana guides you through the process of adding captioning to your communications so that you can go beyond meeting accessibility mandates. The book dispels common myths about deaf and hard-of-hearing people, describes the author’s experiences with deafness, and provides examples of quality captioning.
Made to Sell: Creating Websites that Convert
by Ari Krzyzek & Peter Krzyzek
In “Made to Sell: Creating Websites That Convert” Ari & Peter peel back the curtain to reveal tips and tricks to transform your website, and in turn, your brand and revenue. Whether you have a simple one page site or a complex retail store with thousands of products, we will show you how to move from a pretty store front to a powerful marketing tool.
by Katel LeDû and Lisa Maria Marquis
Whether you want to work with a publisher or on your own, Katel LeDû and Lisa Maria Marquis walk you through crafting a stellar proposal, break down the reality of writing and editing a manuscript, and demystify the marketing and publishing process—so when you’re ready to contribute, you’ll know what to expect.
The User’s Journey: Storymapping Products that People Love
by Donna Lichaw
The User’s Journey will show you how, when, and why to use narrative structure, technique, and principles to ideate, craft, and test a cohesive vision for an engaging outcome.
Prototyping for Designers: Developing the Best Digital and Physical Products
Author Kathryn McElroy explains various prototyping methods, from fast and dirty to high fidelity and refined, and reveals ways to test your prototypes with users.
The Art of Protest: Creating, Discovering, and Activating Art for Your Revolution
by De Nichols
Discover the power of words and images in this thought-provoking look at protest art by highly acclaimed artivist De Nichols.
Your 1st Million’s Already in the Bank!: An Immersive Guide to Achieving a Wealth Mindset
In this book, Yvonne pulls back the curtain and deconstructs what it means to nurture your vision and consistently step outside your comfort zone, while clarifying how to overcome limiting beliefs.
Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences
by Cheryl Platz
Learn the techniques you’ll need to build fluid, adaptive experiences for multiple inputs, multiple outputs, and multiple devices.
Strategic Writing for UX: Drive Engagement, Conversation, and Retention with Every Word
With this practical book, you’ll learn how to write strategically for UX, using tools to build foundational pieces for UI text and UX voice strategy.
How to Make Mistakes on Purpose
Based on Laurie Rosenwald’s popular workshop, How to Make Mistakes On Purpose reveals an intuitive, entertaining way to come up with truly original ideas.
How to Become a Public Speaker in 1 Year
by Catt Small
Gain the confidence to engage audiences on and offstage using Catt’s 10 step process.
Speak, Coach, Train: Strategies to Discover Your Passion
“Speak Coach Train” joins a particular tradition of inspirational and training books about finding one’s voice, recalling life lessons learned, and indulging in their marvelous outcomes.
Life and Death Design: What Life-Saving Technology Can Teach Everyday UX Designers
Designers of life-saving products have leveraged research and brain science to help users reduce panic and harness their best instincts. Life and Death Design brings these techniques to everyday designers who want to help their users think clearly and act safely.
Be Visible! Your Guide to Self Promotion Without Feeling Icky
by Lade Tawak
Whether you want to freelance or work in full-time employment or both, this ebook contains proven tips, tools, and guides to help you overcome the weirdness associated with self-promotion. Learn how to create valuable content that helps you and others as a way to grow your career.
Make Space to Lead: Break Patterns to Find Flow and Focus on What Matters
This book will show you how to stop feeling stuck and anxious all the time so you can stop getting in your way, find flow, and enjoy simply being.
Loud & Proud: LGBTQ+ Speeches that Empower and Inspire
by Tea Uglow
Loud and Proud is an inspirational collection of speeches from the LGBTQ+ community and its allies that have changed our world, and the conversation.
We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships
by Kat Vellos
We Should Get Together is the handbook for anyone who’s ready for better friendships, now.
Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech
Sara Wachter-Boettcher presents a revealing look at how tech industry bias and blind spots get baked into digital products—and harm us all.
A Culture of Safety: Building an Environment for People to Think, Experiment, and Innovate
This book will provide practical tools for leaders to create a culture of safety with their teams and organizations.
Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results
Ready to move your team in the right direction? Read this book together, and learn Wodtke’s powerful system of decision making to create your focus and find success.
Time to Listen: How Giving People Space to Speak Drives Intention and Inclusion
by Indi Young
In this book, world-class researcher Indi Young teaches you how to conduct listening sessions to help your organization move away from a product-focused strategy toward a purpose-focused strategy.
