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
Many interaction and interface designers enjoy the interfaces seen in science-fiction films and television shows. Freed from the rigorous constraints of designing for real users, sci-fi production designers develop blue-sky interfaces that are inspiring, humorous, and even instructive. By carefully studying these “outsider” user interfaces, designers can derive lessons that make their real-world designs more cutting edge and successful.
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.
Card Sorting
Card sorting is an effective, easy-to-use method for understanding how people think about content and categories. It helps you create information that is easy to find and understand. In Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories, Donna Spencer shows you how to plan and run a card sort, analyze the results, and apply the outcomes to your projects.
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.
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.
The User’s Journey
Like a good story, successful design is a series of engaging moments structured over time. The User’s Journey will show you how, when, and why to use narrative structure, technique, and principles to ideate, craft, and test a cohesive vision for an engaging outcome. See how a “story first” approach can transform your product, feature, landing page, flow, campaign, content, or product strategy.
