The Leader’s Journey

No one gives you a manual for how to be a great leader. Enter Donna Lichaw. Her step-by-step book draws on psychology, neuroscience, design thinking, and years of coaching experience to help you activate your superpowers and achieve your mission. You’ll transform yourself, your team, and your business into a league of superheroes poised for success. Follow her blueprint to:

• Figure out your core story of who you are as a leader.
• Identify your superpowers and use them for good.
• Map your mission as a leader in order to achieve your goals and make an impact.
• Develop your strategic roadmap by thinking like a storyteller.
• Learn how to handle tough decisions and move forward with purpose.
• Transform your fears from impediments to assets.
• Engage your superfriends, allies, and even your supervillains so that you can all be super together.
• Reflect back on your journey and build energy for your next mission.

Available from Audible and other major audiobook sellers.

Surveys That Work

Surveys That Work explains a seven-step process for designing, running, and reporting on a survey that gets accurate results. In a no-nonsense style with plenty of examples about real-world compromises, the book focuses on reducing the errors that make up Total Survey Error—a key concept in survey methodology. If you are conducting a survey, this book is a must-have.

Access extra content on Caroline’s website here.

Service Design

Service Design is an eminently practical guide to designing services that work for people. It offers powerful insights, methods, and case studies to help you design, implement, and measure multichannel service experiences with greater impact for customers, businesses, and society.

Design That Scales

After years of building the same interface elements, some designers and developers get wise and try to create reusable, common solutions to help everyone stop reinventing the wheel every time. Most fail. In Design That Scales, design systems expert Dan Mall draws on his extensive experience helping some of the world’s most recognizable brands create design practices that are truly sustainable and successful.

Who Should Read This Book?

People who are building and maintaining design systems, large or small. Designers, engineers, and product managers who are in search of a more efficient way to work. Leaders and executives who want to effect change but aren’t sure how to do it. People who have designed web forms and tables, but don’t know what’s next.

Takeaways

• A design system is crucial for any organization managing two or more digital products. Learn how to create, manage, and sustain a successful design system.
• See how the ecosystem of a design system works in order to understand the context for success.
• Figure out where the people involved in a design system fit and how they can best collaborate.
• Learn the metrics for success within a design system and how to measure them.
• Determine the best techniques for marketing your design system to stakeholders.
• Learn what guidance and relationships are crucial for a design system to succeed.
• See the end-of-chapter questions that highlight how to guide your design system to a profitable outcome.

Stop Wasting Research

Why do crucial customer insights often fail to drive product decisions? The answer: wasted research. Jake Burghardt identifies the insidious root causes of research waste, giving actionable ideas to increase the impact of siloed research. You’ll learn to enhance collaboration, maximize learning, and drive research-informed product launches. Anyone—from UX researchers and insight generators to data scientists and CX analysts—will benefit from these crucial customer insights.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is for anyone who’s seen too many important customer insights that failed to drive next steps in their business. It’s for leaders and practitioners who want to experiment with new ways to increase their organization’s research use in product development and delivery. Specifically, it’s perfect for researchers from any discipline from UX to CX to sales to data science. It’s also a must-read for leaders of product, design, marketing, and engineering —anyone who wants to improve decision-making based on available customer research. And that includes operations people.

Takeaways

• Uncover tools and methods to reduce research waste.
• Learn how to find and use hidden research that might have lasting impact on your organization.
• Discover knowledge-consolidating tools and requirements for repositories.
• Increase the impact of any type of customer research on your organization.
• Note the special “IDEA” sections that show possible actions to choose based on what makes sense for your current resources and organizational context
• See “You Might Be Asking” sidebars, which give answers to common questions.
• Search for “Imagine a Way Forward” sidebars that highlight special scenarios—telling a story of action ideas as step-by-step narratives.
• Look for insightful interviews from experts in the field.
• Read the chapter summaries of key proposals to get more value from research, including a distillation of what success might look like.

Practical Empathy

Conventional product development focuses on the solution. Empathy is a mindset that focuses on people, helping you to understand their thinking patterns and perspectives. Practical Empathy will show you how to gather and compare these patterns to make better decisions, improve your strategy, and collaborate successfully.

Available from Audible and other major audiobook sellers.

Make It So

Why We Fail

Just as pilots and doctors improve by studying crash reports and postmortems, experience designers can improve by learning how customer experience failures cause products to fail in the marketplace. Rather than proselytizing a particular approach to design, Why We Fail holistically explores what teams actually built, why the products failed, and how we can learn from the past to avoid failure ourselves.

The User’s Journey

Like a good story, successful design is a series of engaging moments structured over time. The User’s Journey will show you how, when, and why to use narrative structure, technique, and principles to ideate, craft, and test a cohesive vision for an engaging outcome. See how a “story first” approach can transform your product, feature, landing page, flow, campaign, content, or product strategy.

Engaged

Behavior change design creates entrancing—and effective—products and experiences. Whether you’ve studied psychology or are new to the field, you can incorporate behavior change principles into your designs to help people achieve meaningful goals, learn and grow, and connect with one another. Engaged offers practical tips for design professionals to apply the psychology of engagement to their work.

If these describe you, you may be the audience for this book:

• You love attending conferences like UXPA, CHI, the Habit Summit, or HxRefactored
• Your commute finds you listening to podcasts like Freakonomics Radio, 99% Invisible, HumanTech, or Radiolab
• You have a job title like product manager, designer, or experience strategist (or you do the type of work associated with those titles)
• You’ve worked in design agencies, on in-house strategy or design teams at big companies, or for yourself with clients
• Your shower time is spent thinking about how to make the world a better place by making new products and experiences or fixing the ones already there
• You’re always wondering why people do what they do and how to design for them