Strategic Content Design

In Strategic Content Design, you’ll learn how content research can transform your content team—bringing new energy and enthusiasm for their work and gaining attention and respect from teams of all types across your company (product management, product design, user research, operations, and engineering). You’ll also get a toolbox with hard-won methods, best practices, and proven tips for conducting quantitative and qualitative content-focused research and testing.

Use this book to:

• Create a strong content research program that builds positive energy, inspires your team, and draws attention to the importance of content to your products and business.
• Determine which methods and tools are ideal for your team’s content research needs.
• Identify which specific words or content elements to test. Efficiently analyze your research results to uncover valuable insights about your audience that will contribute to a measurably improved customer experience (and therefore improved business results).
• Show why content research is worth the time and effort.
• Elevate the role of content design in your company, proving that content is key to creating an outstanding customer experience—and to improving your company’s bottom line by saving your company on costs and increasing revenue.
• Get buy-in and support from colleagues inside and outside of content, leading to improved relationships across teams.

See What I Mean

Interviewing Users (2nd Edition)

Interviewing is easy, right? Anyone can do it… but few do it well enough to unlock the benefits and insights that interviewing users and customers can yield.

In this new and updated edition of the acclaimed classic Interviewing Users, Steve Portigal quickly and effectively dispels the myth that interviewing is trivial. He shows how research studies and logistics can be used to determine concrete goals for a business and takes the reader on a detailed journey into the specifics of interviewing techniques, best practices, fieldwork, documentation, and how to make sense of uncovered data. Then Steve takes the process even further—showing the methods and details behind asking questions—from the words themselves to the interviewer’s actions and how they influence an interview. There is even a chapter on making sure that information gleaned from the research study is used by the business in such a way to make it impactful and worthwhile. Oh, and for good measure he throws in information about Research Operations.

Everyone will get something from this book. But beyond the requisite information, it’s simply a good read. And if you want another good read with stories galore, pick up Steve’s other book Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries.

Who Should Read This Book?

• Anyone and everyone who is interested in finding out what makes their business tick, i.e., who their users are.
• Anyone and everyone who wants to learn how to interview and listen to people.
• Anyone and everyone, including CEOs, user researchers, designers, engineers, marketers, product managers, strategists, interviewers, and you.

Blind Spot

Distracted by traditional metrics and mounting access to data, leaders are blinded to what it actually takes to create greater value for their businesses: meaningful, long-term relationships with their customers.

In Blind Spot, you’ll learn how exceptional organizations—from Disney to Instagram—innovate and sustain valuable, productive customer relationships. Blind Spot’s lessons deliver a groundbreaking perspective shift and win-win approach for your customers, your business—and even your shareholders.

Complete Collection Bundle

Plain and simple: this collection is a complete set of all Rosenfeld Media books, 57 titles, in paperback or three digital formats ( ePub (for iPad), MOBI (for Kindle), and DAISY), at a 20% discount. It’s so much easier than adding each title manually to our shopping cart—and cheaper too!

What’s in this bundle:

• Research That Scales: The ultimate playbook for transforming your research practice, whatever its size or shape, into an impactful and efficient insight-generating engine.
• The User Experience Team of One (2nd edition) A Research and Design Survival Guide: A comprehensive and essential guide for UX and product designers everywhere
• Design for Impact: Your Guide to Designing Effective Product Experiments: Gain practical tips and tools to design better experiments at scale
• Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions: Your guide to prioritizing anything—anytime and anywhere. Harry Max digs into the best practices for prioritization and brings them together in a single, practical method that you can apply step by step.
• 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.
• Interviewing Users (2nd Edition): Learn to conduct interviews with anyone. And glean rich insights from each user you speak with.
• 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.
• Strategic Content Design: Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX: Get a toolbox with hard-won methods, best practices, and proven tips for conducting quantitative and qualitative content-focused research and testing.
• Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers: This book 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.
• 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.
• From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice: Your blueprint for creating and managing a content strategy practice that is sustainable and successful.
• Product Management for UX People: From Designing to Thriving in a Product World: Help for designers who seek to understand what it takes to manage products and services.
• Life and Death Design: What Life-Saving Technology Can Teach Everyday UX Designers: Techniques for everyday designers who want to help their users think clearly and act safely.
• Surveys That Work: A Practical Guide for Designing and Running Better Surveys: Focuses on reducing the errors that make up Total Survey Error—a key concept in survey methodology.
• Conversations with Things: UX Design for Chat and Voice: How to design conversations that are useful, ethical, and human-centered—because everyone deserves to be understood, especially you.
• Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences: Learn the techniques you’ll need to build fluid, adaptive experiences for multiple inputs, multiple outputs, and multiple devices.
• Liftoff! Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You: Your guide to leveling up as a design manager and leader.
• Figure It Out: Getting from Information to Understanding: How to transform information into better presentations, better meetings, better software, and better decisions.
• The Jobs To Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs
• Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change: Practical tips for design professionals to apply the psychology of engagement to their work.
• Writing Is Designing: This book will show you how to give your users clarity, test your words, and collaborate with your team.
• 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.
• Meeting Design: Design principles and innovative approaches you’ll need to transform meetings from boring to creative, from wasteful to productive.
• 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.
• Project Management for Humans: Estimate and plan tasks, scout and address issues before they become problems, and communicate with and hold people accountable.
• Designing Agentive Technology: A conceptual grounding and practical advice to unlock agentive technology’s massive potential.
• 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.
• Build Better Products: Develop products and features that improve your business’s bottom line while dramatically improving customer experience.
• Blind Spot: Learn how exceptional organizations—from Disney to Instagram—innovate and sustain valuable, productive customer relationships.
• Liminal Thinking: 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.
• 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.
• Designing Interface Animation: A crash course in motion design theory and practice for web designers, UX professionals, and front-end developers alike.
• The User’s Journey: See how a “story first” approach can transform your product, feature, landing page, flow, campaign, content, or product strategy.
• Validating Product Ideas: Gain the strategy and lean tactics to create an effective user research process from beginning to end.
• Managing Chaos: Digital governance and its transformative power to support creativity, real collaboration, digital quality, and online growth.
• Practical Empathy: Make better decisions, improve your strategy, and collaborate successfully.
• Design for Kids: Learn how to create digital products for today’s connected generation.
• A Web for Everyone: Practical advice and examples of how to create sites that everyone can use.
• Eye Tracking the User Experience: Step-by-step advice on how to plan, prepare, and conduct eye tracking studies; how to analyze and interpret eye movement data; and how to successfully communicate eye tracking findings.
• Why We Fail: How we can learn from the past to avoid failure ourselves.
• Design for Care: Case studies, design methods, and leading-edge research illuminate emerging opportunities and provide inspiration for designing better services.
• 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.
• 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.
• See What I Mean: Learn how to create comics about your products and processes without an illustrator—just like Google, eBay, and Adobe do.
• Make It So: Derive lessons from sci-fi production designers that make their real-world designs more cutting edge and successful.
• The Mobile Frontier: Explore the possibilities that mobile technology presents.
• Playful Design: User experience practitioners can realize enormous benefit by exploiting the solutions that games have found to the real problems of design.
• Search Analytics for Your Site: 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.
• Storytelling for User Experience: Craft and tell your own unique stories to improve your designs.
• Remote Research: Design and conduct remote research studies, top to bottom, with little more than a phone and a laptop.
• Prototyping: Discover 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: Plan and run a card sort, analyze the results, and apply the outcomes to your projects.
• Design Is the Problem: How the endemic culture of design often creates unsustainable solutions, and shows how to ensure that design processes lead to more sustainable products and services.
• Web Form Design: Everything you need to know about designing effective and engaging Web forms.
• Mental Models: A roll-up-your-sleeves book for designers, managers, and anyone else interested in making design strategic, and successful.

Validating Product Ideas

Want to know what your users are thinking? If you’re a product manager or developer, this book will help you learn the techniques for finding the answers to your most burning questions about your customers. With step-by-step guidance, Validating Product Ideas shows you how to tackle the research to build the best possible product.

The Design Conductors

Your favorite apps and programs share one thing in common: they are all thoughtfully designed. Design Operations is the business practice that ensures great design and great designers thrive and deliver meaningful impact. The Design Conductors is your comprehensive guide to DesignOps. You’ll learn how to successfully advocate for, build out, scale up, and ultimately operate design organizations.

Who Should Read This Book

Although this book is definitely for designers, it’s also an essential field guide for product and project managers of all types. Anyone who works in the intersection of process and change management, such as healthcare, tech, or financial services, can learn the design methodologies used by DesignOps practitioners. People who work hand-in-hand with designers, particularly those in the field of software, hardware, or creative design, will also find this book useful. Finally, leaders in design, product, business, and engineering should read this book to learn how to create their own DesignOps culture where teams who build great user experiences can thrive.

Takeaways

• Learn what DesignOps is and where it began.
• Explore the most common backgrounds for people who want to become DesignOps practitioners.
• Define the eight career competencies that all DesignOps practitioners share.
• Discover how to build a DesignOps practice with a handy framework created by one of the authors.
• Highlight the different kinds of paths that DesignOps professionals can take in their careers (with real-world examples).
• Operationalize values by leading to effect transformative changes in teams and businesses.
• Show how the four most common DesignOps org models influence the ways in which teams can function and be organized.
• Uncover how different opportunities and areas of ownership are influenced by a network of related roles.
• Learn the practical application of building, running, and growing a DesignOps team—one that is already in existence or one that is built from scratch.
• Follow the comprehensive toolkit for anyone seeking to join a DesignOps team–from the interview process through a set of guidelines for hiring managers to conduct interviews of prospective talent.

Managing Priorities

Managing Priorities is your guide to prioritizing anything—anytime and anywhere. Harry Max digs into the best practices for prioritization at Apple, DreamWorks, NASA, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, and beyond, and brings them together in a single, practical method that you can apply step by step.

Who Should Read This Book?

Every business person who is even remotely interested in prioritization should read Managing Priorities. Whatever you need to prioritize—tasks, goals, OKRs, projects——this book is for you. Specific chapters are dedicated to what needs to happen and when for individuals, teams, and whole organizations.

Takeaways

• Learn what prioritization is.
• Gain insight into the costs of not prioritizing intentionally.
• Explore different methods of prioritization, including the Eisenhower Matrix, the Analytic Hierarchy Process, the Max Priorities Pyramid, Paired Comparison, Stack Ranking, and more (highlighted in the Appendix).
• Apply the author’s DEGAP® method of prioritization with its five phases: Decide, Engage, Gather, Arrange, Prioritize.
• Identify, understand, and address your current state or lack of prioritization (the context of your problem, the people involved, and the issues surrounding timing).
• Use a scale to differentiate items to prioritize and arrange them appropriately.
• Select an approach to prioritization that works for your specific situation.

The Right Way to Select Technology

Why do half of all technology projects fail? A major reason is that organizations often pick the wrong tools, leaving them digitally hamstrung from the start. This book offers a modern alternative to traditional waterfall approaches to selecting technology. You’ll learn a practical, adaptive process that relies on realistic storytelling and hands-on testing to get the best fit for your enterprise.

Design for Impact

Design for Impact is a down-to-earth A/B testing guide. It features the Conversion Design process to operationalize effective experimentation in your company. In it, Erin Weigel gives you practical tips and tools to design better experiments at scale. She does this with self-deprecating humor that will leave you smiling—if not laughing aloud. As a bonus, The Good Experimental Design toolkit presents everything you learn into step-by-step process for you to use each day.

Who Should Read This Book

If you’re a curious person working in tech who wants to deliver impactful work, you should read this book. If you’re a business leader looking to help your team make better decisions, you should read this book. If you want to level-up your approach to experimentation, you should read this book. In short, everyone—from CEOs to marketers, engineers, product people, through to designers and content folks—should read this book.

Takeaways

• Learn a fun, balanced approach to digital product experimentation to get your whole team testing customer-centric ideas.
• Stop making changes and start making improvements with the Conversion Design process.
• Follow the Good Experimental Design toolkit so that you and your entire team design for impact together.
• Clear up confusion around A/B testing with helpful tools and practical advice.
• Look for loads of actionable tips for effective product experimentation to give your team insight into the big picture.
• Make the complex math behind why experimentation works easy and understandable.