Storytelling for User Experience

We all use stories to communicate, explore, persuade, and inspire. In user experience, stories help us to understand our users, learn about their goals, explain our research, and demonstrate our design ideas. In this book, Quesenbery and Brooks teach you how to craft and tell your own unique stories to improve your designs.

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.

The Game Development Strategy Guide

Some of today’s most popular video games have been on the market for decades, while others barely make it days before disappearing forever. What differentiates the games that survive? This expansive look at modern video game development gives you an end-to-end, cross-disciplinary understanding of the people, processes, and core design principles you’ll need to create video games that thrive.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is for anyone and everyone interested in working on and creating games, including the
following people:

• Aspiring game developers of any discipline.
• Veteran game developers looking to reframe their understanding of game development to account for modern trends and standards.
• Creative leaders who need to build and support environments where great video games are created.
• Game designers trying to improve their understanding of the business considerations that have felled so many recent games.
• User experience designers looking to understand, define, and expand their impact in the broader video game market.
• Producers struggling with the choice of business model or monetization choices for their games.
• Partners to video game developers like legal counsel, business development, venture capitalists, marketing, licensing, and human relations.

Takeaways

• Sets a standard for basic game design principles.
• Gives a foundation in the science and art of universal player motivation, critical to informing decisions about the game.
• Demystifies the modern gaming business, including live-service games.
• Walks through the roles that people and companies play in the game development process.
• Provides a common language for game development techniques.
• Shows how to achieve creative ideation and learn prioritization techniques.
• Explores more advanced design topics to help games thrive over time.
• Highlights how to design games that encourage positive social experiences.
• Defines modern video gaming monetization techniques.
• Codifies common ethical and legal issues.
• Provides a shared understanding of key video games hardware, software, engines, and platforms.
• Explores what works and what doesn’t in gaming—showing common patterns in the industry and design struggles.
• Gives insights that will apply to teams and games of any size—from indie games to mega games
• Highlights an oversight of the industry for nonindustry partners who need to understand game development, including the business development and legal areas.

Design for Learning

Online learning can be so dull. Enter Design for Learning. Whether you’re a novice or experienced online instructional designer, you’ll learn how to apply industry best practices, how-to examples, powerful templates, and compelling activities to craft compelling instructional content for text, audio, and video. Read, enjoy, and create online learning experiences that will never be called “dull”!

Takeaways

• Writing compelling content and instructional text
• Designing interesting text and visuals
• Planning and producing videos
• Recording sound and voice-overs
• Creating and facilitating live website presentations
• Designing surveys for class feedback
• Rating whether your presentation was successful

Who This Book Is For

• Teachers, learning development professionals, and anyone tasked with designing an online course or a one-off workshop
• Content creators, instructional designers, user experience designers, and others who care about the experience of online learning

Whether you’re a novice or experienced online instructional designer, this book will show you how to apply industry best practices, and provide how-to examples, powerful templates, and activities to craft compelling instructional content—whether text, audio, or video.

Best of all—your course will never be called dull again.

Build Better Products

It’s easier than ever to build a new product. But developing a great product that people actually want to buy and use is another story. Build Better Products is a hands-on, step-by-step guide that helps teams incorporate strategy, empathy, design, and analytics into their development process. You’ll learn to develop products and features that improve your business’s bottom line while dramatically improving customer experience.

Eye Tracking the User Experience

Eye tracking is a widely used research method, but there are many questions and misconceptions about how to effectively apply it. Eye Tracking the User Experience—the first how-to book about eye tracking for UX practitioners—offers 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.

The Jobs To Be Done Playbook

These days, consumers have real power: they can research companies, compare ratings, and find alternatives with a simple tap. Focusing on customer needs isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a strategic imperative.

The Jobs To Be Done Playbook helps organizations turn market insight into action. This book shows you techniques to make offerings people want, as well as make people want your offering.

Who this book is for

Change makers and transformation agents inside of companies looking to shift focus towards a customer-centric perspective. It’s suited for managers and thought leaders seeking internal alignment around solving customer problems and addressing unmet needs. More specifically, this book is for people who have limited resources and would like to use JTBD in a lightweight manner.

Key takeaway

A new way of seeing your customers and their desired outcomes

Available from Audible and other major audiobook sellers.

We Need to Talk

Drawing from psychology, neuroscience, and years of real-world experience, We Need to Talk provides a practical framework for navigating difficult conversations with confidence and empathy. Whether you’re dealing with workplace conflicts, team dynamics, or challenging personal discussions, this book equips you with the tools to transform confrontational situations into opportunities for growth and understanding. No scripts, no shortcuts—just proven strategies that work.

Who Should Read This Book

If you work with other humans, this book is for you. Whether you’re a leader trying to build psychological safety on your team, an individual contributor navigating tricky workplace dynamics, or someone who wants to get better at having hard conversations, you’ll find practical tools here. While the examples come primarily from technology and creative fields, the framework works across industries and various roles. You’ll learn how to transform potentially confrontational situations into opportunities for growth and understanding, all while staying true to your authentic communication style. This isn’t about becoming a conflict expert—it’s about you feeling confident and capable when those inevitable tough conversations arise.

Takeaways

• Learn the core principles underlying difficult conversations.
• Delve into how your brain processes conflict.
• Study a multitude of techniques for maintaining psychological safety.
• Learn to apply practical solutions to solving real-world problems.
• Practice handling difficult conversations in your own authentic way.
• Figure out specific techniques for staying centered, asking the right questions, and keeping your cool when caught off guard.
• Learn how to navigate the tricky waters of conflict when you don’t agree with your boss.
• Study de-escalation techniques for a tense situation in order to guide conversations back to productive territory.
• Say no and mean it!

A Web for Everyone

If you are in charge of the user experience, development, or strategy for a web site, A Web for Everyone will help you make your site accessible without sacrificing design or innovation. Rooted in universal design principles, this book provides solutions: practical advice and examples of how to create sites that everyone can use.

Research That Scales

Most organizations fail to tap into the game-changing power of research. Research That Scales is the ultimate playbook for transforming your research practice, whatever its size or shape, into an impactful and efficient insight-generating engine. Use it to plan, manage, and scale a research practice that propels the business forward.

Who Should Read This Book

If you’re a research leader, a researcher, or a ResearchOps specialist, this book is a must-read. But if you work in product management, design, content, marketing, academia, or for an agency, and do research as part of your work, this book is for you, too. Anyone involved in devising strategies and systems that support scaled-up human-centered research will find Research That Scales invaluable.

Takeaways

• Learn what it means to scale research and how to build purpose into your research practice.
• Gain a pragmatic view of research strategy and why it’s crucial to scaling research.
• Design a research operating system that can grow the impact of research.
• Uncover the eight elements of research operations and the ResearchOps Venn diagram.
• Use the ResearchOps Planning Matrix to deliver operations that make good ideas real.
• Build systems that make finding the right research participants a breeze.
• Learn how to make the most of research by developing a research knowledge management (RKM) strategy.
• Build a foundation of trust with your company and stakeholders by shifting perceptions about research.
• Make ethics and data privacy more than a checklist of dos and don’ts and lofty principles.
• Learn how to become a “money magnet” for research.
• Attract and retain the best research talent to fuel your growth.