User Research
An annotated collection of 4 books on user research, spanning 2015 to 2021. Featuring works by Indi Young, Karen Holtzblatt & Hugh Beyer, Michele Hansen and 1 more — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
Practical Empathy: For Collaboration and Creativity in Your Work
Young's book is the operational companion to everything else in this section — a careful treatment of empathy as a research methodology rather than an emotion. The central move is a specific kind of listening: listening…
Contextual Design: Design for Life
Holtzblatt and Beyer's contextual design methodology is one of the foundational approaches to bringing field research into product development. The core idea is that you cannot understand users from interviews alone — yo…
Deploy Empathy: A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers
Hansen's book is a practical manual on customer interviewing written by someone who has done hundreds of them inside a bootstrapped software company. The book's strongest feature is its granularity: transcripts, question…
Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value
Torres turns the vague practice of "talking to users" into a weekly rhythm: interviews every week, opportunity solution trees, assumptions framed as testable hypotheses, and a discipline for getting from conversations to…