Liftoff!

Liftoff! is your guide to leveling up as a design manager and leader. Its experience-driven approach—written by designers for designers—will help you hire and scale teams, develop careers, learn why diversity matters to your business, and solidify design’s role in your organization. Liftoff! will elevate your skills to lead your team and company to new heights.

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.

Designing Interface Animation

Effective interface animation deftly combines form and function to improve feedback, aid in orientation, direct attention, show causality, and express your brand’s personality. Designing Interface Animation shows you how to create web animation that balances purpose and style while blending seamlessly into the user’s experience. This book is a crash course in motion design theory and practice for web designers, UX professionals, and front-end developers alike.

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.

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.

Conversations with Things

Welcome to the future, where you can talk with the digital things around you: voice assistants, chatbots, and more. But these interactions can be unhelpful and frustrating—sometimes even offensive or biased. Conversations with Things teaches you how to design conversations that are useful, ethical, and human-centered—because everyone deserves to be understood, especially you.

Who this book is for

• Design practitioners involved in creating digital products, who are beginning their journey into conversational interfaces.
• Developers who have built voice or chatbot projects, but may not be familiar with advanced design – or even what it truly means to design something.
• Other non-technical members of the team, like PMs and BAs who need to understand the process, and sales reps new to conversational interface products.

Changemakers

Today’s radically complex problems require people to lead with design. Changemakers is an essential playbook for designers and nondesigners who want to drive change at work, at home, and in their communities. Groundbreaking designers Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland—armed with insights from some of today’s top minds in business, tech, and social justice—offer a pragmatic, people-centered approach to change.

Who Should Read This Book?

Changemakers can be designers, leaders, CEOs, tech people, project managers, product people—virtually anyone who wants to embrace and address change. This book will show them how to do it by clearly defining, studying, and addressing change as a design problem to be solved.

Takeaways

• A new approach to change is emerging, and design is at the forefront of responding and provoking change.
• Purpose and passion are essential changemaker qualities.
• Change involves choosing the right problem and finding an entity open to change.
• This book will be your guide for creating and maintaining change in your organization—for you, your team, and your stakeholders.
• Leaders can design change and affect the world—this book will show them how to become that kind of leader.
• Each chapter has critical takeaways at the end of the chapter, summarizing important points.
• Each chapter gives the reader a list of extra sources to gain further knowledge.

User Research Bundle

What this bundle includes:

• Research That Scales: The ultimate playbook for transforming your research practice, whatever its size or shape, into an impactful and efficient insight-generating engine.
• Mental Models: A roll-up-your-sleeves book for designers, managers, and anyone else interested in making design strategic, and successful.
• Interviewing Users (2nd edition): An updated edition of the acclaimed classic
• The Jobs To Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs
• Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: 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.
• Practical Empathy: Make better decisions, improve your strategy, and collaborate successfully.
• Build Better Products: Develop products and features that improve your business’s bottom line while dramatically improving customer experience.
• Validating Product Ideas: Gain the strategy and lean tactics to create an effective user research process from beginning to end.
• Eye Tracking the User Experience: A practical guide to research and the first how-to book about eye tracking for UX practitioners
• Remote Research: Learn how to design and conduct remote research studies, top to bottom, with little more than a phone and a laptop.
• 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.
• Surveys That Work: A Practical Guide for Designing and Running Better Surveys

Stop Wasting Research

UX research, data science, market research, and other insight-generators fuel decisions in today’s product organizations. Yet many of their crucial insights fail to land with leaders and stakeholders.
These insights are experienced as fleeting inspiration, becoming effectively lost in the deluge of other information and priorities. Even as tech organizations tout their use of ‘data’ in decision making, much of their essential research languishes in low-engagement archives, failing to drive what’s next.

Stop Wasting Research explores three root causes, then provides ways forward and action ideas to better integrate insights into your product planning and design practices. From preparing research communities and their outputs for extended impacts, to crafting new motivators for putting insights to use, to pushing the right touchpoints with research knowledge – Stop Wasting Research will help you enhance collaboration, amplify learning, increase research literacy, and drive customer-centered launches.

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