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.

Human-Centered Security

Creating great user experiences demands balancing user and stakeholder goals, limited resources, and rapidly-changing technology. Information security introduces a new, significant wrinkle for designers: managing security risk. The risk is significant. That’s because we not only rely on technology to run critical systems, we have invited technology to coexist with us in the physical world. We’ve put computers into cars, machinery, and even medical devices. In these scenarios, a security breach goes beyond stolen credentials or exposed private information—it could mean the difference between life and death. While security used to be thought of as the domain of engineers and security experts, designers play an increasingly critical role: thoughtfully designing products and experiences that maximize user-friendliness while still keeping people safe.

Prayag Narula on AI’s Role in Qualitative Research

Prayag Narula is the founder and CEO of Marvin, a tool for qualitative researchers. Prayag will also be a speaker at the Advancing Research Conference where he’ll share the stage with Rida Qadri, a research scientist at Google.

Humans have been doing quantitative research for thousands of years – well, for as long as math has been around. Qualitative research, on the other hand, is fairly new to human history, emerging only in the 20th Century. And qualitative research has taken a backseat to what Prayag calls “the tyranny of math,” the prevailing attitude that if research is not math-based, it’s not valid. But that doesn’t diminish the importance of qualitative data. Decisions at all levels are made based on qualitative data every day.

Here are some characteristics of qualitative research:
• Qualitative research is scientific and has been used in the social sciences for scientific discovery for six decades.
• Qualitative data is highly variable and semi-structured, so creating software for it has enormous challenges.
• Taking notes and asking questions are inherent parts of qualitative research, and tools that can search and synthesize such data can dramatically enhance productivity and outcomes.

It’s time for qualitative research to be given its due. Enter Marvin.

Software not only gives validity and legitimacy to qualitative research, it makes it more useful. Marvin uses AI to add context to the conversation and to help with analysis. The tool is free for individuals and teams of two researchers.

Prayag is excited about the use of open AI and ChatGBT. He’s not worried about these tools replacing researchers, but they do give researchers another data point, that is, what AI can glean from the data. AI can help us find patterns that we didn’t see before or might give an interpretation of the data or ask a question that hadn’t been previously considered. With tools like Marvin, it’s an exciting time to be in research.

What you’ll learn from this episode
• How software brings legitimacy to processes and data
• About Marvin, a tool that “automates the tedious parts of qualitative research”
• How AI can augment research
• What to expect from Prayag’s upcoming talk with Rida Qadri at Advancing Research – “HCI 2.0: Humanity Deserves the Attention that UX Research has to Offer” – which will include implementing technologies in a socially responsible way

Quick Reference Guide
[00:00] Introduction of Prayag
[01:07] Upcoming talk at Advancing Research March 27-29, 2023
[01:29] Prayag gives a history of his entrepreneurial experience
[05:15] Prayag explains why he felt driven to provide a centralized place for data
[08:53] Does having software to support qualitative research contribute to its perceived legitimacy?
[11:00] On the nature of qualitative research being highly variable and semi-structured and what that means when it comes to writing software
[16:12] Break: Rosenfeld Media Communities
[18:16] Prayag describes the Marvin tool, available for free for individual researchers and teams of two
[0:19:52] The role of AI in research software
[0:25:04] On AI’s ability to synthesize data across various sectors of an organization
[0:29:08] More details Prayag’s upcoming talk with Rida Qadri at Advancing Research in March
[0:32:33] Prayag’s gift to the audience

What UX research can learn from other research practices [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series] (Videoconference)

Three of your research colleagues discussed and defended their respective positions (below) on what UX research can learn from other research practices. Participants engaged with them in a discussion and Q&A, facilitated by Brianna Sylver.

“UX research is inherently future-oriented. An anthropology of the future can offer more distinguished and nuanced ways to explore the meaning of users’ expectations, anticipations, hopes, and speculations.”

     – Nicole Aleong

“UX research should learn more from market research, a larger and more mature field in which it has roots. Market research is a multidisciplinary field with an extensive collection of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies that have been used to support product development decisions to deliver business outcomes for decades—no need to reinvent the wheel.”

     – Michaela Mora

“UX research is often viewed as cute, charming and ‘nice to have.’ For that perception to change in the market, we need to learn from those charging millions of dollars for their strategic research skills: management consultants.”

     – Prayag Narula