Design topic
UX is the discipline of making sure you are building the right thing before you make it beautiful. It spans research, information architecture, user flows, wireframing, and usability testing: the methods that replace opinion with evidence. Study it alongside visual craft, not instead of it.
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.
Jesse James Garrett
Jesse James Garrett's model of UX as five planes, from strategy up to surface.
Steve Krug
A short, practical classic on web usability and common-sense navigation.
Jon Yablonski
A concise, visual reference of psychology-based heuristics like Hick’s Law, Fitts’s Law, and Jakob’s Law.
Growth.Design
Interactive UX case studies analyzing real products through the lens of psychology.
Nielsen Norman Group
The Nielsen Norman Group's library of research-based articles on usability and UX.