The Leader’s Journey
No one gives you a manual for how to be a great leader. Enter Donna Lichaw. Her 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. You’ll transform yourself, your team, and your business into a league of superheroes poised for success. Follow her blueprint to:
- Figure out your core story of who you are as a leader.
- Identify your superpowers and use them for good.
- Map your mission as a leader in order to achieve your goals and make an impact.
- Develop your strategic roadmap by thinking like a storyteller.
- Learn how to handle tough decisions and move forward with purpose.
- Transform your fears from impediments to assets.
- Engage your superfriends, allies, and even your supervillains so that you can all be super together.
- Reflect back on your journey and build energy for your next mission.
Available from Audible and other major audiobook sellers.
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.
Life and Death Design
Emergencies—landing a malfunctioning plane, resuscitating a heart attack victim, or avoiding a head-on car crash—all require split-second decisions that can mean life or death. Fortunately, designers of life-saving products have leveraged research and brain science to help users reduce panic and harness their best instincts. Life and Death Design brings these techniques to everyday designers who want to help their users think clearly and act safely.
Content Everywhere
Care about content? Better copy isn’t enough. As devices and channels multiply—and as users expect to relate, share, and shift information quickly—we need content that can go more places, more easily. Content Everywhere will help you stop creating fixed, single-purpose content and start making it more future-ready, flexible, reusable, manageable, and meaningful wherever it needs to go.
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.
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.
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.
Available from Audible and other major audiobook sellers.
Project Management for Humans
Project management—it’s not just about following a template or using a tool, but rather developing personal skills and intuition to find a method that works for everyone. Whether you’re a designer or a manager, Project Management for Humans will help you estimate and plan tasks, scout and address issues before they become problems, and communicate with and hold people accountable.
Mental Models
There is no single methodology for creating the perfect product—but you can increase your odds. One of the best ways is to understand users’ reasons for doing things. Mental Models gives you the tools to help you grasp, and design for, those reasons. Adaptive Path co-founder Indi Young has written a roll-up-your-sleeves book for designers, managers, and anyone else interested in making design strategic, and successful.
Design for Kids
Emotion. Ego. Impatience. Stubbornness. Characteristics like these make creating sites and apps for kids a daunting proposition. However, with a bit of knowledge, you can design experiences that help children think, play, and learn. With Design for Kids, you’ll learn how to create digital products for today’s connected generation.
