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.

Design Is the Problem

Product design can have a tremendous impact on the world in terms of usability, waste, and resources. In Design Is the Problem, Nathan Shedroff examines how the endemic culture of design often creates unsustainable solutions, and shows how to ensure that design processes lead to more sustainable products and services.

Digital and Marketing Asset Management

The digital world is transitioning from text to media: photos, audio files, video clips, animations, games, and more. Enterprises of all kinds struggle with how to manage those media assets. Digital professionals who want to master the life cycles behind creating, storing, and reusing media need the inside scoop on how digital and media asset management technology really works.

Closing the Loop

As design continues to impact our products, services, and solutions at scale, it is more important than ever to understand the systems and context that surround design decisions. Closing the Loop will help you make the invisible visible. It will introduce you to a powerful systems thinking mindset, and provide you with the tools and frameworks to define the systems that surround your work.

Meeting Design

Meetings don’t have to be painfully inefficient snoozefests—if you design them. Meeting Design will teach you the design principles and innovative approaches you’ll need to transform meetings from boring to creative, from wasteful to productive. Meetings can and should be indispensable to your organization; Kevin Hoffman will show you how to design them for success.

Managing Chaos

Few organizations realize a return on their digital investment. They’re distracted by political infighting and technology-first solutions. To reach the next level, organizations must realign their assets—people, content, and technology—by practicing the discipline of digital governance. Managing Chaos inspires new and necessary conversations about digital governance and its transformative power to support creativity, real collaboration, digital quality, and online growth.

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.

Liminal Thinking

Why do some people succeed at change while others fail? It’s the way they think! Liminal thinking is a way to create change by understanding, shaping, and reframing beliefs. What beliefs are stopping you right now?

You have a choice. You can create the world you want to live in, or live in a world created by others. If you are ready to start making changes, read this book.

What is liminal thinking? Liminal is a word that means boundary, doorway, portal. Not this or that, not the old way or the new way, but neither and both. A state of ambiguity or disorientation that precedes a breakthrough to a new kind of thinking. The space between. Liminal thinking is a kind of psychological agility that enables you to success- fully navigate these times of transition. It involves the ability to read your own beliefs and needs; the ability to read others’ beliefs and needs; and the habit of continually evaluating, validating, and changing beliefs in order to better meet needs.

Design Beyond Devices

Your customer has five senses and a small universe of devices. Why aren’t you designing for all of them? Go beyond screens, keyboards, and touchscreens by letting your customer’s humanity drive the experience—not a specific device or input type. Learn the techniques you’ll need to build fluid, adaptive experiences for multiple inputs, multiple outputs, and multiple devices.

Who this book is for

• Designers navigating the complexities of cross-channel design, driving cohesion across web, mobile, and other device experiences.
• Designers working specifically on heavily multimodal experiences like Amazon’s Echo devices, Google Home, Apple Vision Pro, Oculus Quest, televisions, smart watches, video games, theme parks, and automotive experiences.
• Entrepreneurs and inventors looking to improve their user-centered thinking techniques with tangible frameworks they can apply to product design and engineering efforts immediately.
• Students looking to understand the future potential of human-centered technology

Key takeaways

• Frameworks for researching, documenting, and understanding human behavior and context
• An overview of all input and output modalities mapped against current technologies and accessibility considerations
• Frameworks for delivering complex systems like notifications, interruption models, and multimodal design systems
• Direct guidance on deliverables needed to deliver advanced cross-channel designs
• Ethical frameworks for querying your potential work against potential human impact, and strengthening your product designs in advance to accommodate risks