My Books
Writing has been a thread running through my entire career — a way to work through ideas, share what I’ve learned, and contribute something lasting to the design community. My books focus on the human side of design: how emotion, leadership, and craft combine to create products that genuinely connect with people.
A Book Apart · 2011, 2nd Ed. 2020
Designing for Emotion
My first book, Designing for Emotion, makes the case that emotion isn’t a finishing layer on a product — it’s the thing that decides whether people trust it, return to it, or tell their friends about it. Drawing from psychology, storytelling, and interface design, I lay out how personality, surprise, and small human details can turn a useful product into one people actually love.
The work has been put into practice at companies like Mailchimp, Zappos, and Apple, and the principles have held up across a decade of platform shifts. The updated edition extends the ideas to new contexts and includes fresh examples from teams working at scale. Jeffrey Zeldman called it “the book I wish I had written”; Jason Fried and others have called it essential reading for anyone building products for people.
Available now on Design Better →
“Emotion becomes an unfair advantage for your business.”
Jake KnappAuthor of Sprint“Goes beyond just functional to what is truly delightful.”
Julie ZhuoAuthor of The Making of a ManagerDesign Better · 2018
Principles of Product Design
Principles of Product Design distills the practices that show up again and again at the design teams doing the best work — what they research, how they prototype, how they think in systems, and how they work across functions. I wrote it with input from practitioners at Netflix, Google, Slack, Airbnb, and Dropbox, pulling the patterns out of dozens of conversations and turning them into something a designer at any level can put to use on Monday morning.
Published as part of the Design Better library, the book has been downloaded over 400,000 times alongside the other ten titles in the series.
Available on Design Better →
Design Better · 2019
Design Leadership Handbook
Eli Woolery and I wrote the Design Leadership Handbook for designers stepping into their first leadership role — the moment when the skills that made you a great IC stop being the ones that make you a great leader. The book covers what no one teaches you in design school: how to hire and coach, run a useful critique, give feedback that actually changes the work, build career paths for your team, and explain design’s value to people who don’t speak the language.
We drew on conversations with senior design leaders at Netflix, Airbnb, Slack, Spotify, 3M, Twitter, and Mailchimp — people who’d already worked through the problems our readers were facing. The handbook has been adopted by design programs at universities and used inside design organizations around the world.
Available on Design Better →