Design topic
Interaction design is the choreography of a product: how it responds, what it affords, and how motion communicates cause and effect. Affordances, feedback, states, motion, and microinteractions are what separate an interface that feels alive from one that feels like a static mockup.
Don Norman
The foundational text on human-centered design, affordances, signifiers, and feedback.
This is where the vocabulary of interaction design comes from: affordance, signifier, mapping, feedback. Norman teaches you to blame the design, not the user, and once that clicks you cannot unsee bad design in the world. Read it before any UX process book, because it gives you the why underneath the methods.
Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, Christopher Noessel
Alan Cooper and colleagues' comprehensive text on the principles and patterns of interaction design.
Jon Yablonski
A concise, visual reference of psychology-based heuristics like Hick’s Law, Fitts’s Law, and Jakob’s Law.
Dan Saffer
A focused book on designing the small moments: triggers, rules, feedback, and loops.
Apple
Apple's official guidance on designing for its platforms, and a model of clear platform documentation.
Andrey Sitnik, Ivan Solovev
A visual reference of common easing functions for animation.
Growth.Design
Interactive UX case studies analyzing real products through the lens of psychology.