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.

Writing Is Designing

Without words, apps would be an unusable jumble of shapes and icons, while voice interfaces and chatbots wouldn’t even exist. Words make software human-centered, and require just as much thought as the branding and code. This book will show you how to give your users clarity, test your words, and collaborate with your team. You’ll see that writing is designing.

Who this book is for

• People who make their living writing and leading content strategy for software interfaces, or those who want to transition into this type of role from another writing background.
• Designers and design leaders.
• Product managers, engineers, and executives.

Available from Audible and other major audiobook sellers.

Product Management for UX People

User experience designers and researchers often struggle with the idea of product management—as a peer discipline, a job title, a future career, or even what the title entails. But surprisingly, there is no roadmap for designers who want to understand what it takes to manage products and services. At least, not until now.

Enter Christian Crumlish with his book, Product Management for UX People. An experienced product manager himself, Crumlish delves into the intersections and gaps between design and product management—for designers who work with product managers and designers who want to become product managers. You’ll find all the answers to your questions about this intriguing career.

Who Should Read This Book

UX professionals who are curious about product management and want to know which of their skills might apply to the products role if they are considering a career change. Any UX person who works on a product team and wants to figure out how best to work in that context. A UX practitioner or manager who is considering a transition to product management and needs guidance about the responsibilities and career possibilities.

Takeaways

• Define what product management means for your business and what product managers actually do.
• Apply your skills as a UX practitioner to the product manager role.
• Learn how product managers work with engineers to keep teams aligned and take responsibility for business outcomes.
• Figure out how product managers, UX practitioners, and teams can work together effectively.
• Pinpoint how to say “no” to stakeholders and make difficult choices between competing priorities
• Read compelling stories about the author’s experiences, as well as other people’s stories in “From the Trenches” sidebars.
• Be sure to read the “44 Signs You Are Becoming a ‘Real’ Product Manager.”
• Figure out how best to work with data analytics for growth, engagement, and retention in your business.
• Learn how to test hypotheses with real-world experiments.
• Discuss profit and loss models, revenue models, and how to break even.
• Look for “Key Insights” at the end of each chapter, which highlight the important points to remember.

Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries

User research war stories are personal accounts of the challenges researchers encounter out in the field, where mishaps are inevitable, yet incredibly instructive. Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries is a diverse compilation of war stories that range from comically bizarre to astonishingly tragic, tied together with valuable lessons from expert user researcher Steve Portigal.

New Releases Bundle

What this bundle includes:

• Stop Wasting Research: Maximize the Product Impact of Your Organization’s Customer Insights: Use research more effectively to fuel product innovation and cross-team collaboration.
• We Need to Talk: A Survival Guide for Tough Conversations: Build confidence in hard conversations with real-world strategies for empathy, psychological safety, and navigating conflict at work or in life.
• Human-Centered Security: How to Design Systems That Are Both Safe and Usable: Ensure that your organization’s security experience is strong and effective.
• The Design Conductors: Your Essential Guide to Design Operations: Learn how to successfully advocate for, build out, scale up, and ultimately operate design organizations.
• Research That Scales: The Research Operations Handbook: The ultimate playbook for transforming your research practice, whatever its size or shape, into an impactful and efficient insight-generating engine.
• The User Experience Team of One (2nd edition): A Research and Design Survival Guide: A comprehensive and essential guide for UX and product designers everywhere
• Design for Impact: Your Guide to Designing Effective Product Experiments: A down-to-earth A/B testing guide that features the Conversion Design process to operationalize effective experimentation in your company.
• Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions: Your guide to prioritizing anything—anytime and anywhere. Harry Max digs into the best practices for prioritization and brings them together in a single, practical method that you can apply step by step.
• Duly Noted: Extend Your Mind through Connected Notes: Learn best-practice note-taking principles so you can connect your notes to one another to create a personal network of ideas (your own personal “knowledge garden”).

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Deliberate Intervention

“Do no harm” is Alex Schmidt’s mantra throughout Deliberate Intervention—a book that delves into how policy and design can work together to prevent harms in technology. Using the journalistic approach she employed as an NPR reporter, Schmidt studies the history of policy making, its biases, and its evolution in the changing technology field. The beginning of each chapter highlights a graphic showing the transformation of policy and design, drawn by well-known illustrator, MJ Broadbent.

Readers will learn:

• How policy and design can partner.
• The history of policy and how evident harms have led to policy interventions and improvements.
• As harms emerge from technology, individuals and companies really do have the tools to intervene.
• Government can control harms with new policies.
• How to create better policy with solid design measures.
• What the future looks like for people with the advent of new technology.

Who this book is for:

This book is for anyone who is concerned about the harms of technology and interested in ways to circumvent them, i.e., policy makers, CEOs of tech companies, IT people, designers, lawyers, security analysts, product managers, healthcare workers, historians, writers—in other words, just about everyone. It’s particularly helpful for anyone who is designing anything that involves technology and is worried about the potential harm in their decision-making.

Human-Centered Security

In our interconnected world, we face a complex cybersecurity ecosystem where digital vulnerabilities can have far-reaching consequences. Threats to digital infrastructure often impact critical physical systems, potentially causing real-world harm. With AI agents set to handle extensive personal information, data security and privacy are more crucial than ever.

Human-Centered Security targets professionals designing digital products that handle sensitive data: UX designers, engineers, and product managers. It’s also for those responsible for securing organizational data and systems: security engineers, CISOs, CIOs, and teams focused on risk management, legal, privacy, and compliance.

These professionals influence security-related behaviors and possess deep knowledge of threats to their products or organizations. This places a significant responsibility on them to design resilient systems that encourage safer outcomes. As the stakes continue to rise in our digital landscape, their role in protecting users from evolving cybersecurity risks becomes increasingly vital.

This book will help you:

• Focus on areas of the user experience where security impacts users the most. These are places where users are signing up, configuring a product for the first time, handling customer or patient data, or when confronted with a security or privacy-related message or warning, to name a few.
• Understand the dynamics of the security ecosystem. Looking at the security ecosystem from a single vantage point won’t work. Instead, you need to understand how the system design impacts users, how user actions prompt changes to the system design, how threat actors take advantage, how threat actors actions prompt changes to the system design, how users react, and on and on.
• Find your security UX allies. Think of a Venn diagram, with circles representing the security team, the UX team, the product team, the engineering team, the legal and privacy teams, as so on. To improve the security user experience, these circles must overlap. In other words, each group’s expertise and perspective are required to understand and design for the dynamic cybersecurity ecosystem.
• Ask better questions when talking to your cross-disciplinary team. These questions will help your team anticipate how users might react and how threat actors might take advantage.
• What to consider when designing for secure outcomes. The book examines some of the most common security user experience issues.
• Embrace iteration. Users will do things you didn’t expect or account for. Even more importantly, threat actors will act in ways you couldn’t have predicted. What was effective yesterday might not be as effective today.

From Solo to Scaled

Content strategy is clearly critical to your organization, but where do you start, and how do you grow it into a true practice? Whether you’re a lone content person tasked with creating a content strategy practice from scratch, or a leader struggling to scale one up, From Solo to Scaled is your blueprint for creating and managing a content strategy practice that is sustainable and successful.