So You Want to Write a UX Book
We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t think UX was a dynamic field, with enough subject matter to fill many books. Maybe you want to write one of those books yourself, but you’re daunted by the prospect. Understandable; a book is a formidable undertaking, especially on top of a full-time job, family, and other obligations. It also might just be the best thing you’ve ever done. Ready to take the leap? Some veteran RM authors offer tips that may help see you through the process and bring your book to its your ship date.
Write something every day (or nearly)
And keep track of your progress. While writing UX Team of One, Leah Buley jotted down each day’s work onto a big flip-chart calendar she kept in the kitchen. “I could look back and see when there were big chunks of time when I’d been writing diligently or when I’d simply been writing nothing. Each was motivating in its own way.” Sometimes she wrote on her CalTrain commute, happy to arrive at the office with the day’s writing already done.
Daily writing ignites momentum, and that, says Kevin Cheng, is “the only thing that matters.” Dabbling once a week, “it takes hours to get back into the swing,” says Cheng, author of See What I Mean. “When I started working daily, I could find myself with ten minutes before a bus came and still make noticeable progress, because the entire book’s status was in my head.” Once he got into a regular groove, the “runner’s high” kicked in and made it easier to keep going.
Cloister yourself
To throw down on Why We Fail, Victor Lombardi spent a week in a beach house off-season. “That allowed me to escape all other home and work distractions, and to research and write three chapters in that time,” he says.
Cloistering also was huge for Cheng. He finished his first draft in a cabin in the redwood forests of northern California, where he stowed away his phone and disabled all time-telling devices so he wouldn’t watch the clock. “I found that I was able to enter flow almost immediately,” he wrote in a blog post about the experience. “I got a lot more done in a shorter period of time than I normally would have.”
Don’t cloister yourself
What’s that? You don’t have the time or wherewithal to hunker down in a remote cabin? Not to worry; plenty of RM authors penned their books in crowded, noisy environs. Andy Polaine, who lives in Germany, worked on Service Design on long train journeys to and from Switzerland. “Personally, I work better in crowded spaces—trains, cafés—than I do in silence,” he says. “In solitary silence, every tiny thing is a distraction. In crowded places, my writing is the distraction.”
While cloistering may work for the heavy lifting of a first draft or cranking out copy for a deadline, Peter Jones finds it too confining for reviewing and revising. “A secluded office can lead to over-focus, making me hypercritical, and I end up wordsmithing meaning to death.” But he cautions, “Be careful following my advice; Design for Care took forever to write.”
Make It So co-author Nathan Shedroff finds cloistering helpful for certain tasks of book production, such as sorting research material, creating outlines, and indexing. But at other phases, solitude is counterproductive. “I find that writing is, at times, so confounding that being cloistered actually makes me less focused and more of a procrastinator,” he says.
If you’re collaborating with others, of course, some human contact will be necessary. The authors of Service Design—Polaine, Ben Reason, and Lavrans Løvlie—live in three different countries. Skype, Basecamp, Dropbox, and other tools helped immensely, but about halfway through, says Polaine, “we really needed a couple of days in a room together to nail the re-structuring. There’s nothing like having stuff pinned up on the wall.”
You won’t get everything in
You have a ton of material, yet UX changes all the time. How do you cover everything in such a way that it won’t be old news by the time the book’s published?
You probably can’t. Accepting that fact helped Sara Wachter-Boettcher move forward with Content Everywhere. “If I stick to a limited scope and do it well, my book will inspire further books and articles that tackle the topics I didn’t get to, or that dive deep into something I barely skimmed,” she says. “Getting stuck on the idea that you have to be exhaustive about your topic is a failing proposition: You will never finish that way.” If it just kills you to leave out certain stuff, well, blogs are lovely for that sort of thing, aren’t they?
Go analog
Ditching the laptop and writing on paper helped Buley drop “a work-y/email-y voice” and tap into “a different voice that was more intimate and conversational, which is the voice that I really want to share with readers.” She wrote her entire book on paper, then used dictation software to get it into digital form. “Probably not the most efficient method in the world, but it worked for me.”
Avail yourself of others.
Make It So co-author Chris Noessel says presenting material at conferences while he and Shedroff were writing the book “put pressure on us to find out what works, what doesn’t work, and get suggestions on improvements.” Other authors echoed this sentiment. Don’t be afraid to ask for input, they say; most people will be glad to offer some.
But before anything, you gotta produce some words. Other people can help with this too. Joining a “Shut Up and Write” meetup in San Francisco helped Aga Bojko plow ahead on Eye Tracking the User Experience. Her favorite sessions are weekend marathons held in a coffee shop, during which members write for ninety-minute sprints—no talking, no phones—broken up by thirty-minute breaks for eating, drinking, and socializing. People in her group work on everything from screenplays to poetry to dissertations. “The main idea is to get together and, thanks to peer pressure and encouragement, get a lot done,” says Bojko. “And we do get a lot done!”
A support system of trusted friends or colleagues, says Wachter-Boettcher, can help battle “the soul-sucking beast” of impostor syndrome: I’m not smart enough to do this. Everyone will laugh at this. “These are normal feelings but remember that they don’t reflect reality,” she says. And don’t be shy about drawing the line on outside input. Says Noessel: “Instruct your friends to not ask how the book is going. It’s the polite thing to do.”
And some other stuff.
Shedroff: “Take long flights and don’t watch the movie.”
Cheng: “Sometimes, momentum can be lost on the other end (after the book is finished) because the editors or other support people are busy with their schedules or other books. It’s as much up to you to keep the momentum going and not let that be an excuse for you to go, ‘Well, I haven’t heard from them. …”
Noessel: “It will take longer than you think.” “You have to build authority in the text, not presume it.” “The book will (should?) change the way you think. This is awesome.”
Buley: “Some people have what they want to say in their head at the beginning, and some people figure out what they want to say through the process of writing. I’m in the second camp. Once I realized that … I didn’t feel so bogged down by imposter syndrome or the slow guilties.” Also: “Get pregnant! A due date makes for a very formidable deadline.”
Wachter-Boettcher: “Write your heart out, do your damnedest, and be rigorous. But don’t drag your feet. After all, anyone can write. Authors ship.”
A Short Interview With Dirk Knemeyer
Dirk Knemeyer is the founder and CEO of Facio, Inc., a software start-up dedicated to dramatically improving understanding of the self and one another. He offers courses on Applied Empathy Frameworks, Starting Up Software and the Catalyst Method.
We got to sit down and talk with Dirk about Applied Empathy and product development. Here’s what he had to say:
Rosenfeld Media: How does the Applied Empathy Framework help in product development?
Dirk Knemeyer: The reason why Apple, in digital products, and precious few companies overall, bring such wonderfully designed products to market is that they have a largely instinctive understanding of the sweet spot between what the market needs from a features perspective, what people want from an aesthetic perspective, and what the proper style is to stand up and above the rest of the market.
For those few companies, that’s fantastic. But for the rest of us, we can either trail in their wake or try and do something about it.
The reason that Apple’s products are so popular and their customers so loyal is because they connect with users on a deeper level. Rather than being devices to complete a task, or objects of style, the truly exceptional products intertwine with key aspects of an individual’s identity. They make a meaningful difference in one or more of our physical, emotional and intellectual selves.
The Applied Empathy Framework provides a road map so the rest of us mere mortals can intentionally plan and execute to create breakthrough products that succeed on the most powerful levels of connecting with passionate customers.
RM: As you’ve investigated the Catalyst method, which increases employee engagement, what’s one thing that’s really surprised you?
DK: Gosh, it’s so many little things. I’ll tell you the one thing that I think is most important: being considerate of each person and treating them uniquely based on who they authentically are. That might sound simple or common sense on the surface, but it most certainly isn’t. As just one example—some people like to meet formally in a private space; other people like to meet casually in a more open space. Most managers engage their employees in the way that is most comfortable for them, the manager. This creates real cultural issues where people who are more “alike” to the manager in this way are most successful, while those who are the most different are statistically far more likely to struggle. And again, this is only one example.
We’ve identified more than a dozen key markers between co-workers and/or managers and employees that have a huge impact on job satisfaction and productivity, just based on the intersection of different personality traits.
With Catalyst we help people understand their own and others’ personality specifics and begin to more intentionally engage with one another. It’s a fantastic thing to see in action. Only 31 percent of employees in the U.S. today are engaged with their jobs, and—based on a $60,000 annual salary—engaged workers create about $28,000 bottom line impact for their employers each year. It is not rocket science to realize the remarkable importance of addressing this in a long-term and organization-wide way. That’s what we’re doing.
5 books for the price of 4
Happy news!
If you have four books in your Rosenfeld Media shopping cart, you can add one more… free! No discount code necessary—just add the fifth book (in the same format—paperback or digital) and our cart will automatically figure out not to charge you extra. (If you’d rather use a discount code, please do, but you can’t do both.) It’s that simple.
No, there are no strings attached. We just like you. And we want to you to enjoy more Rosenfeld Media books.
Now on sale: “Design for Care: Innovating Healthcare Experience”
Design for Care: Innovating Healthcare Experience—which we proudly launched this morning—is a very different kind of Rosenfeld Media book. It’s our first book focused on a specific industry—healthcare, of course. It’s also something of a service design book and a design strategy book to boot.
It takes a visionary like Peter Jones, on the faculty at OCAD, to thread such a needle. The result is a book with depth that we hope will serve as a model for other “vertical” books. After all, as the design field becomes increasingly recognized as strategically important, we’ll need to contextualize its value for a variety of wicked problems—ones that are often associated with particular industries.
We hope you enjoy Design for Care!
Interview with UX Expert Steve Krug
We’re thrilled to have Steve Krug speaking at our upcoming conference, 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips!
Register yourself—or your team—for the May 29th day-long (10am-5pm ET) virtual conference. You’ll learn from and interact with UX experts you know and respect: Steve Krug, Luke Wroblewski, Susan Weinschenk, Aarron Walter, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Whitney Quesenbery.
This week we pick Steve’s brain about UX tactics and DIY Usability. Here’s what he had to say:
Rosenfeld Media: You’ve always been a big proponent of DIY Usability, i.e. the fact that it’s not rocket science so anyone should be able to do it. We understand anyone can do it, but does that mean they can do it well?
Steve Krug: Actually, my trademarked slogan is “It’s not rocket surgery,”™ but why quibble? You’re right: it does mean I believe that most people—with a little instruction—can do much of what I do as a usability consultant. They can’t do it as well as I can—hopefully—because I’ve been doing it for 25 years, but a lot of it is just applying common sense.
And that’s particularly true for running some basic usability tests. Someone with experience–especially a professional–can probably do a better job than an amateur. But can an amateur do it well? In my experience, almost anyone can do at least a halfway decent job right away. After all, it mostly consists of just giving someone a task (or tasks) to do using whatever you’re building, and then watching them while keeping them thinking aloud.
In fact, the hardest part for beginners is biting their tongue and resisting the impulse to help, to comment, and to ask leading questions.
RM: But does this mean they can do it well enough to make it worthwhile?
SK: I think so, for a few reasons.
First, someone beginning to do DIY testing probably hasn’t been doing any testing before, and some testing is infinitely better than none.
Second, if they haven’t been doing any testing, then there are probably huge usability problems just waiting to be found. So even if the facilitation is less than perfect, the participant is still going to run into the worst problems and the observers are going to see them.
And finally, I’ve been asking people for years to send me examples of cases where testing by amateurs made a product worse. And after all this time, I haven’t had anyone send me a convincing example. In fact, most of the examples I’ve received have been where supposed professionals did a shoddy job. It makes sense that these are the ones I get, because professionals are—correctly—held to a higher standard.
So I guess my answer is that amateurs may not do a perfect job, but they almost always do it more than well enough.
RM: If anyone can do it themselves, when would you need an expert or consultant to come in and help?
SK: I’ve always said that if you can afford to hire a professional, by all means do it. It’s just that the vast majority of the people out there developing “stuff”—sites, apps, etc.—can’t afford to hire someone. That’s why I’m always trying to teach people how to do it themselves.
But if you have any money for it, I’d highly recommend at least hiring a professional to do two things:
1. An expert review. Having a pro look at your stuff and apply their years of experience is enormously valuable. In particular, they’re likely to have a lot of knowledge about what’s worth fixing, and what kinds of fixes will actually work. It’s a great investment.
2. Coaching. Even if you’re doing DIY testing, it’s great to have someone with experience looking over your shoulder and mentoring while you get started. They can help you formulate task scenarios, show you ways to recruit participants, observe your sessions and critique your facilitation skills, and decide what to fix and how to fix it.
Like I said, professionals are going to be better at it than you are. But if you can’t afford to have one around all the time, get them to teach you.
RM: Thanks, Steve!
There’s still time to sign up for 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips! Join Steve along with five other experts for this awesome virtual event on May 29th.
Now on sale: Steve Portigal’s “Interviewing Users”
We’re very happy to welcome a new member to the family: Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, by Steve Portigal. Our fifteenth (!) title, it’s something of a throwback to our early days, when we were focused on UX method books. And interviewing is a method that we’re all so familiar with, that we often take our skills for granted. That’s where Steve’s book comes in—by showing us how easy it is do it wrong and how to get it right.
Through his many years as a consultant, speaker, and columnist, Steve has helped so many in our community improve their interviewing skills. We’re proud to help Steve take Interviewing Users to a new level.
Interview with UX Expert Susan Weinschenk
We’re so excited that Susan Weinschenk will be sharing her UX wisdom at our upcoming event, 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips!
Register yourself—or your team—for the May 29th day-long (10am-5pm ET) virtual conference. You’ll learn from and interact with UX experts you know and respect: Steve Krug, Luke Wroblewski, Susan Weinschenk, Aarron Walter, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Whitney Quesenbery.
This week we pick Susan’s brain about what the heck neuropsychology has to do with UX and how she entered the field to begin with. Here’s what she had to say:
Rosenfeld Media: There don’t appear to be many neuropsychologists running around the world of UX. How did you find your way into this field?
Susan Weinschenk: I was in graduate school getting a Ph.D. in Psychology and took my first programming class. I became fascinated with the relationship between psychology and interaction design. This was quite a while ago, when only specialists and scientists even USED a computer. I realized that as computers became more ubiquitous there would be a clash between the “user’s” mental model of how to get something done and the “system’s” mental model.
Then I discovered that there was a field of study—human factors—that specialized in this human/computer interaction and I was hooked! I was studying the brain at the time (left brain/right brain) and doing EEG studies (this was way before fMRI was available), so the neuropsychology applied to design was pretty much inevitable. I worked in usability and interaction design for many years, and then in the last 10 years I came back to my neuropsychology roots—the research on brain function in the last 10-15 years has really grown, and I ended up kind of where I started!
RM: Are there other major branches of psychology that could be applied to UX in a useful way?
SW: Many specialties in psychology apply, and I use all of them—cognitive psychology (memory, thinking), perceptual psychology (vision, hearing, tactile processing), personality, social… they all apply in my opinion and I use them all!
RM: Thanks, Susan!
There’s still time to sign up for 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips! Join Susan along with five other experts for this awesome virtual event on May 29th.
Indi Young to tackle Practical Empathy
This one was a no-brainer.
We’ve signed a new book that will help researchers and designers take better advantage of empathy. We often take it for granted that we UX practitioners are, by definition, empathetic. But we’re often wrong. And even if we are reasonably empathetic, we can all do better—by taking a conscious and critical dive into what empathy means and how we can actually use it more effectively. That’s where Practical Empathy, due out in 2014, will help.
And of course, we’re thrilled to be working once again with Indi Young—author of our very first book, Mental Models, co-founder of Adaptive Path, and Rosenfeld Media expert. I’ve had the unique pleasure of discovering huge mental model diagrams papering clients’ war rooms again and again and again. Given that I’m both a consultant and publisher, you can guess how happy that makes me. I’m hoping Practical Empathy will have a similarly powerful impact on our industry.
Interview with UX Expert Luke Wroblewski
Luke Wroblewski will be sharing some awesome and practical advice at our upcoming event, coincidentally titled 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips.
Register yourself—or your team—for the May 29th day-long (10am-5pm ET) virtual conference. You’ll learn from and interact with UX experts you know and respect: Steve Krug, Luke Wroblewski, Susan Weinschenk, Aarron Walter, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Whitney Quesenbery.
This week we pick Luke’s brain about how he stays ahead of the UX trends. Here’s what he had to say:
Rosenfeld Media: You seem to be ahead of the rest of us when it comes to figuring out what’s going to be important in the field. Your books, like Web Form Design, are great examples of that. What’s your secret? How do you figure it out?
Luke Wroblewski: Being late to things. In all seriousness, I don’t think the trick is being early. Its being there at the right time. For example, it was no secret that mobile was going to be huge. In fact, for many years it was projected to be the “next big thing in 3 to 5 years,” like many other technologies or trends we talk about today. But if you got there too early you were alone.
I’m usually not the first one to uncover new things, but I think I’ve been lucky with getting there at a time when lots of other people were also trying to figure stuff out—when there’s lots of questions that need answering. I love to learn and explore new things so I feel good in that kind of environment. I also tend to get a handle on things by writing them out in order to understand them. So I do that a lot and share what I learn.
As a result, I uncover things that are of interest to people wrestling with the same questions. As the number of people encountering these questions increases, so does interest in the topic. And maybe that’s why it feels like I’m “ahead.” I certainly don’t feel that way on most days!
RM: What do you think the next “big thing” will be in the UX field?
LW: I hear lots of people wrestling with delivering great experiences to a wide range of devices: laptops, desktops, tablets, phones, and everything in between. All these things are connected to the network so if you are making digital applications or publishing digital information—they’re your problem. And there are lots of interesting, unanswered questions when it comes to designing and developing for this multi-device Web.
But it seems like this is just the start. TVs, watches, glasses, cars, wearables, and much more just extend this problem. Once you have more than one of these devices, questions about how they can work together become really important as well. These are the areas I’m most interested in these days. No guarantees that they’ll be the next “big thing” but there is a lot of uncertainty out there about how to tackle these problems. Which, to me, is really exciting.
RM: Thanks, Luke!
There’s still time to sign up for 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips! Join Luke along with five other experts for this awesome virtual event on May 29th.
Interview with Whitney Quesenbery
Whitney Quesenbery will be sharing some essential bits of advice in our upcoming event, 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips! It’s a one-day virtual conference in which 6 experts offer…you guessed it…31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips!
Register yourself—or your team—for the May 29th day-long (10am-5pm ET) virtual conference. You’ll learn from and interact with UX experts you know and respect: Steve Krug, Luke Wroblewski, Susan Weinschenk, Aarron Walter, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Whitney Quesenbery.
This week we pick Whitney’s brain about universal design principles and the content of her forthcoming book. Here’s what she had to say:
Rosenfeld Media: You and Sarah Horton have a new book coming out, Web Design For Everyone—can you tell us about it?
Whitney Quesenbery: Almost three years ago, we started talking to Lou about an accessibility book. As important as the technical standards are, I knew that a Rosenfeld Media book has to start with the user experience. And I’m not that technical. I wanted a way to think about a project that would start with people, and would acknowledge all of the different considerations that go into making a web site or app.
Think about what it takes to do something as simple as putting a heading on the screen. There’s user research and IA, content strategy and HTML markup, graphic design and CSS coding, the structure of the site and the server it sits on. All of them have to pull together to make that heading show up in a browser. If we can get all of that right, adding accessibility doesn’t seem so hard.
We’ve organized the book around the way we think as UXers. It starts with personas, so we don’t forget that UX is about people. Then, each chapter looks at one principle of UX design:
- Clear purpose
- Solid structure
- Easy interaction
- Helpful wayfinding
- Clean presentation
- Plain language
- Accessible media
- Universal usability
The principles also take in the many disciplines that contribute to UX, so we hope that any practitioner can explore how their own skills and method contribute to making a web for everyone.
RM: You mention “Universal Design Principles” in your book? Could you tell us a little about those?
WQ: One of the things I like about the Universal Design Principles is that they really are principles – not rigid rules for design. I think of them as 7 questions to ask about any UX project. The answers guide the design towards a product that can be used by everyone.
- Is it an equitable experience, appealing to all equally?
- Is it flexible, allowing for people to choose how to use it?
- Is it simple, consistent, and clear?
- Does it present information in multiple ways, supporting all senses?
- Does it tolerate errors without punishing users?
- Is it comfortable and efficient to use?
- Does it allow people with different physical abilities to use it?
Those sound like questions I’d want to ask about anything I worked on. The big leap to universal principles is thinking about people with many different abilities and preferences, not just dictating one experience.
You might also notice that these principles can be applied to physical objects and spaces, not just to the web. The group that created them in 1997 included architects, industrial designers and engineers. They were concerned with how people interacted with anything in the world — which now includes the online world. That makes a lot of sense to me now that user experience includes both software and hardware devices.
(You can read the official version at the Center for Universal Design)
RM: We heard that we should be designing for Mobile First, but you’re actually addressing Accessibility First. Are these themes in conflict? Or do they complement one another?
WQ: They are absolutely not in conflict. In fact, I think we’d have better web sites if we combined them. Both of them say that we need to start by designing for constraints. In both cases, there are both technical and human constraints.
In mobile, for example, you have a small screen, limited bandwidth, and a device that is often used by someone on the go – certainly not a person sitting at an ergonomically correct desk, paying complete attention to the interface. Mobile First simply says to design for that situation. Find the most critical features. Make the screen easy to read. And make sure that people can tap on buttons or other controls without accidentally doing the wrong thing.
In accessibility, the constraints are the human senses and the need for alternatives. What if someone can’t see the image or hear the video intro? Can they use the site? The same responsive design approach that lets a site or app work on different size screens also lets it work when users need larger text, or different colors.
Both mobile and accessibility also rely on sites built to strong standards. This may sound pretty boring, but it makes all sorts of things possible because accessibility relies on two things that standards provide: flexibility (for different ways of displaying content) and interoperability (so that people can choose the technology that fits their needs). This solid structure is a foundation for a great user experience for everyone.
RM: Thanks, Whitney!
There’s still time to sign up for 31 Awesomely Practical UX Tips! Join Whitney along with five other experts for this awesome virtual event on May 29th.
