(For background, I'm a faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute) For best books, it depends on if you want to understand users or do implementation. But generally, I'd highly recommend Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things to improve how you look at the world, and Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think for simple and practical design tips. For tools, the best is paper prototypi…
Hi Jason, I'm familiar with the academic research in paper prototyping (for background, I have a Ph.D. in CS [HCI], have been a HCI course assistant, and published in academic HCI/design conferences). To say that paper prototyping is the best implies a certain design philosophy, team structure, and organizational culture. It requires a certain buy-in, level of trust, and design pace that are not appropriate for all i…
Yes, you're right that it does suggest a certain kind of corporate culture and mindset. A common big challenge with UX is educating the rest of your company about best practices, and most importantly, demonstrating results.
Convincing (say) skeptical engineers of the value of user studies can be hard. A common technique is showing videos of user studies and people failing to use the product. Another common technique is to bring an engineer to a site visit and get first hand experience of the pain points.