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Design That Scales

After years of building the same interface elements, some designers and developers get wise and try to create reusable, common solutions to help everyone stop reinventing the wheel every time. Most fail. In Design That Scales, design systems expert Dan Mall draws on his extensive experience helping some of the world’s most recognizable brands create design practices that are truly sustainable and successful.

Who Should Read This Book?

People who are building and maintaining design systems, large or small. Designers, engineers, and product managers who are in search of a more efficient way to work. Leaders and executives who want to effect change but aren’t sure how to do it. People who have designed web forms and tables, but don’t know what’s next.

Takeaways

  • A design system is crucial for any organization managing two or more digital products. Learn how to create, manage, and sustain a successful design system.
  • See how the ecosystem of a design system works in order to understand the context for success.
  • Figure out where the people involved in a design system fit and how they can best collaborate.
  • Learn the metrics for success within a design system and how to measure them.
  • Determine the best techniques for marketing your design system to stakeholders.
  • Learn what guidance and relationships are crucial for a design system to succeed.
  • See the end-of-chapter questions that highlight how to guide your design system to a profitable outcome.

Search Analytics for Your Site

Any organization that has a searchable web site or intranet is sitting on top of hugely valuable and usually under-exploited data: logs that capture what users are searching for, how often each query was searched, and how many results each query retrieved. Search queries are gold: they are real data that show us exactly what users are searching for in their own words. This book shows you 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.

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.

Closing the Loop

As design continues to impact our products, services, and solutions at scale, it is more important than ever to understand the systems and context that surround design decisions. Closing the Loop will help you make the invisible visible. It 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.

Engaged

Behavior change design creates entrancing—and effective—products and experiences. Whether you’ve studied psychology or are new to the field, you can incorporate behavior change principles into your designs to help people achieve meaningful goals, learn and grow, and connect with one another. Engaged offers practical tips for design professionals to apply the psychology of engagement to their work.

If these describe you, you may be the audience for this book:

  • You love attending conferences like UXPA, CHI, the Habit Summit, or HxRefactored
  • Your commute finds you listening to podcasts like Freakonomics Radio, 99% Invisible, HumanTech, or Radiolab
  • You have a job title like product manager, designer, or experience strategist (or you do the type of work associated with those titles)
  • You’ve worked in design agencies, on in-house strategy or design teams at big companies, or for yourself with clients
  • Your shower time is spent thinking about how to make the world a better place by making new products and experiences or fixing the ones already there
  • You’re always wondering why people do what they do and how to design for them

Remote Research

Remote research allows you to recruit subjects quickly, cheaply, and immediately, and give you the opportunity to observe users as they behave naturally in their own environment. In Remote Research, Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte teach you how to design and conduct remote research studies, top to bottom, with little more than a phone and a laptop.

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.

Managing Chaos

Few organizations realize a return on their digital investment. They’re distracted by political infighting and technology-first solutions. To reach the next level, organizations must realign their assets—people, content, and technology—by practicing the discipline of digital governance. Managing Chaos inspires new and necessary conversations about digital governance and its transformative power to support creativity, real collaboration, digital quality, and online growth.

DesignOps Bundle

What this bundle includes:

  • Research That Scales: The ultimate playbook for transforming your research practice, whatever its size or shape, into an impactful and efficient insight-generating engine.
  • Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions
  • Design That Scales: Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice: Learn how to create, manage, and sustain a successful design system.
  • 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.
  • Orchestrating Experiences: A practical guide for designers and everyone struggling to create products and services in complex environments.
  • Managing Chaos: Digital governance and its transformative power to support creativity, real collaboration, digital quality, and online growth.

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.