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.
Prototyping
Prototyping is a great way to communicate the intent of a design both clearly and effectively. Prototypes help you to flesh out design ideas, test assumptions, and gather real-time feedback from users.
With this book, Todd Zaki Warfel shows how prototypes are more than just a design tool by demonstrating how they can help you market a product, gain internal buy-in, and test feasibility with your development team.
Card Sorting
Card sorting is an effective, easy-to-use method for understanding how people think about content and categories. It helps you create information that is easy to find and understand. In Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories, Donna Spencer shows you how to plan and run a card sort, analyze the results, and apply the outcomes to your projects.
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.
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.
Make It So
Many interaction and interface designers enjoy the interfaces seen in science-fiction films and television shows. Freed from the rigorous constraints of designing for real users, sci-fi production designers develop blue-sky interfaces that are inspiring, humorous, and even instructive. By carefully studying these “outsider” user interfaces, designers can derive lessons that make their real-world designs more cutting edge and successful.
The User Experience Team of One (1st Edition)
Second edition now on preorder!
The User Experience Team of One prescribes a range of approaches that have big impact and take less time and fewer resources than the standard lineup of UX deliverables. Whether you want to cross over into user experience or you’re a seasoned practitioner trying to drag your organization forward, this book gives you tools and insight for doing more with less.
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.
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.
