Enduring Play

The video game industry has grown to become a darling of the entertainment industry, with $184 billion of revenue in 2023. But that expansion has increased competition exponentially, and today’s game developers face a tougher struggle than ever before to differentiate their titles before a market full of algorithmic recommendations swallows them whole. Enduring Play invites both industry veterans and aspiring game developers and designers to level up their game development craft to this newest normal. Explore the modern game development process holistically to gain new understanding about how the most successful games are made. No stone is left unturned – from process, roles, and market concepts like live service games and monetization to basic game design principles and UX design best practices.

Design for Privacy

Living and working online means grappling with the impact of a dizzying array of online privacy issues. Service providers offer opaque explanations for why they need our data and what they’re doing with it. Many deploy deceptive experiences to access and handle or even sell our personal data. What can we do as designers to understand these issues, address them with our stakeholders, and avoid them during the design process, so we can minimize their impact upon users?

Design for Privacy will advocate for the practice of “privacy by design” and examine specific and often alarming examples of these issues. You’ll learn the four “pillars” for privacy-centered experience design and best practices, with both good and bad examples to visualize problems along the way, so you can design more confidently with privacy in mind. And you’ll learn to cultivate a culture which enables privacy by design.

The Staff Designer

Staff design is a combination of team leadership and in-the-pixels design work, all without any direct people management. There are tons of management books, but very little help for senior designers who want to keep working with the pixels. Fret not: this handbook will guide you to success — whether you’re already navigating a Staff Design role, or you’re an Independent Contributor deciding whether or not to embark on the journey. You’ll learn methods to build influence as an individual contributor, improve your executive communication, and impact strategy at scale.

Take-aways

• Understand Staff Designer roles and responsibilities, including how they differ from Senior Designers, to set appropriate expectations with teams and executives.
• Enhance executive communication skills and cross-team collaboration to influence company vision and roadmap at a strategic level.
• Develop effective time management and boundary-setting strategies to sustainably focus on high-impact, strategic work.

Design Leadership Bundle

What this bundle includes:

• Design That Scales: Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice: Learn how to create, manage, and sustain a successful design system.
• Blind Spot: Learn how exceptional organizations—from Disney to Instagram—innovate and sustain valuable, productive customer relationships.
• Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World: An essential playbook for designers and nondesigners who want to drive change at work, at home, and in their communities.
• Deliberate Intervention: Using Policy and Design to Blunt the Harms of New Technology: Your blueprint for creating and managing a content strategy practice that is sustainable and successful.
• The Jobs To Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs
• The Leader’s Journey: Transforming Your Leadership to Achieve the Extraordinary: This 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.
• Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions
• Liftoff! Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You: Your guide to leveling up as a design manager and leader.
• Managing Chaos: Digital governance and its transformative power to support creativity, real collaboration, digital quality, and online growth.
• The Right Way to Select Technology: Learn a practical, adaptive process that relies on realistic storytelling and hands-on testing to get the best fit for your enterprise.

Customer Experience Bundle

What this bundle includes:

• The Jobs To Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs
• Life and Death Design: What Life-Saving Technology Can Teach Everyday UX Designers
• Orchestrating Experiences: A practical guide for designers and everyone struggling to create products and services in complex environments.
• Service Design: Insights, methods, and case studies to help you design, implement, and measure multichannel service experiences with greater impact.
• The User’s Journey: See how a “story first” approach can transform your product, feature, landing page, flow, campaign, content, or product strategy.
• Why We Fail: How we can learn from the past to avoid failure ourselves.

Information Architecture Bundle

What this bundle includes:

• 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”).
• Design That Scales: Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice: Learn how to create, manage, and sustain a successful design system.
• Search Analytics for Your Site: How to use search analytics to carry on a conversation with your customers: listen to and understand their needs, and improve your content, navigation, and search performance to meet those needs.
• Card Sorting: How to plan and run a card sort, analyze the results, and apply the outcomes to your projects.
• Digital and Marketing Asset Management: For 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.
• Content Everywhere: Stop creating fixed, single-purpose content and start making it more future-ready, flexible, reusable, manageable, and meaningful wherever it needs to go.
• Figure It Out: Shows us how to transform information into better presentations, better meetings, better software, and better decisions.
• Living in Information: Draws upon architecture as a way to design information environments that serve our humanity.
• Orchestrating Experiences: A practical guide for designers and everyone struggling to create products and services in complex environments.
• Service Design: Powerful insights, methods, and case studies to help you design, implement, and measure multichannel service experiences with greater impact for customers, businesses, and society.

Service Design Bundle

What this bundle includes:

1. 1. Closing the Loop: A powerful systems thinking mindset that provides you with the tools and frameworks to define the systems that surround your work.
   2. Service Design: Powerful insights, methods, and case studies to help you design, implement, and measure multichannel service experiences with greater impact for customers, businesses, and society.
   3. Orchestrating Experiences: A practical guide for designers and everyone struggling to create products and services in complex environments.
   4. Design for Care: Case studies, design methods, and leading-edge research illuminate emerging opportunities and provide inspiration for designing better services.

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Enterprise User Experience Bundle

What this bundle includes:

1. Managing Chaos: Digital governance and its transformative power to support creativity, real collaboration, digital quality, and online growth.
2. The Right Way to Select Technology: Learn a practical, adaptive process that relies on realistic storytelling and hands-on testing to get the best fit for your enterprise.
3. Digital and Marketing Asset Management: 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.
4. Orchestrating Experiences: A practical guide for designers and everyone struggling to create products and services in complex environments.
5. Living in Information: Draws upon architecture as a way to design information environments that serve our humanity.
6. Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions
7. Service Design: Powerful insights, methods, and case studies to help you design, implement, and measure multichannel service experiences with greater impact for customers, businesses, and society.

The Product of You

Creative and tech professionals are passionate about applying design and creativity to creating products and solving other people’s problems. But there’s an unknown irony that holds them back – they fail to apply their creative and technical muscles (eg. storytelling, problem solving, critical thinking, research, writing, design, etc) to address problems in their careers. For example, designers often overly design their resume and fail to consider the person who’s actually reading it. Writers often get overly creative when writing their LinkedIn profile and resume, which can backfire as algorithms may surface their profile or application to recruiters and hiring managers.

As a result, many are stuck in unfulfilling jobs, aren’t paid what they’re worth, and lack the confidence to reach their full professional potential. In The Product of You, Sarah Doody teaches you how to have a more fulfilling and successful career by treating it as a designed product.

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.