Unconventional tip
Learning sideways means learning from sources/places outside your direct field, outside of product design, rather than just going deeper into design itself.
Most designers learn vertically. More design courses, more case studies, more Figma skills. They go deeper into what they already know.
Learning sideways means going wide. You pull knowledge from adjacent or completely unrelated fields and bring it back into your design work.
A psychology book teaches you why users might hesitate.
Reading about how pilots use checklists teaches you why step-by-step flows matter in high-stakes moments.
Studying how a good therapist listens teaches you how to run a user interview without leading the user.
Watching a great standup comedian teaches you about timing, context, and why the same message lands differently depending on how it’s delivered, which is literally every UX writing problem you’ll ever have and every stakeholder presentation you’ll ever make.
Learning how a con artist builds trust teaches you more about persuasion and mental models than most conversion rate optimization articles ever will.
This kind of learning feels unproductive because it doesn’t look like design education.
But it’s often what separates designers who think differently from designers who all produce the same cookie-cutter work.
It’s unconventional.
It’s intentional.
Explains how people actually make decisions. Not how they say they make decisions. Required reading if you do any kind of research or design for behaviour change.
Written for marketers, but it’ll change how you think about onboarding, empty states, and every moment where a user needs to be nudged.
Written for founders doing customer research, but it will completely change how you run user interviews. Most designers ask questions that make users lie to them, and this book fixes that.