Duly Noted

Better thinking makes you a better person. And few things extend your mind as quickly and powerfully as the humble note. Notes let you fulfill commitments, manage complicated projects, and make your ideas real. Digital notes take you even further. By using the right tools and a bit of discipline, you can cultivate a “personal knowledge garden” where your thinking will blossom.

Who Should Read This Book?

Anyone and everyone who wants to get control of their notes to generate better ideas, learning, and actions. Duly Noted is superb for students, academics, business people, technicians, writers, UX people, managers, leaders—virtually anyone who can benefit from taking and managing notes.

Takeaways

• Learn best-practice note-taking principles so you can take more concise notes.
• Connect your notes to one another to create a personal network of ideas (your own personal “knowledge garden”).
• Capture ideas before you lose them.
• Organize your notes so that you can find and make sense of them later.
• Learn how connected notes can spark insight and lead to new ideas and learning.
• Explore how notes can help you collaborate with other minds, including artificial ones.
• Learn how to use Obsidian, a powerful digital note-taking tool.
• Follow the how-to exercises to lead you through the note-taking maze.

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.

Digital and Marketing Asset Management

The digital world is transitioning from text to media: photos, audio files, video clips, animations, games, and more. Enterprises of all kinds struggle with how to manage those media assets. 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.

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.

Make It So

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 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.

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.

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.

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.