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.

Writing Is Designing

Without words, apps would be an unusable jumble of shapes and icons, while voice interfaces and chatbots wouldn’t even exist. Words make software human-centered, and require just as much thought as the branding and code. This book will show you how to give your users clarity, test your words, and collaborate with your team. You’ll see that writing is designing.

Who this book is for

• People who make their living writing and leading content strategy for software interfaces, or those who want to transition into this type of role from another writing background.
• Designers and design leaders.
• Product managers, engineers, and executives.

Available from Audible and other major audiobook sellers.

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.

Liminal Thinking

Why do some people succeed at change while others fail? It’s the way they think! Liminal thinking is a way to create change by understanding, shaping, and reframing beliefs. What beliefs are stopping you right now?

You have a choice. 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.

What is liminal thinking? Liminal is a word that means boundary, doorway, portal. Not this or that, not the old way or the new way, but neither and both. A state of ambiguity or disorientation that precedes a breakthrough to a new kind of thinking. The space between. Liminal thinking is a kind of psychological agility that enables you to success- fully navigate these times of transition. It involves the ability to read your own beliefs and needs; the ability to read others’ beliefs and needs; and the habit of continually evaluating, validating, and changing beliefs in order to better meet needs.

Design Is the Problem

Product design can have a tremendous impact on the world in terms of usability, waste, and resources. In Design Is the Problem, Nathan Shedroff examines 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.

The Leader’s Journey

No one gives you a manual for how to be a great leader. Enter Donna Lichaw. Her 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. You’ll transform yourself, your team, and your business into a league of superheroes poised for success. Follow her blueprint to:

• Figure out your core story of who you are as a leader.
• Identify your superpowers and use them for good.
• Map your mission as a leader in order to achieve your goals and make an impact.
• Develop your strategic roadmap by thinking like a storyteller.
• Learn how to handle tough decisions and move forward with purpose.
• Transform your fears from impediments to assets.
• Engage your superfriends, allies, and even your supervillains so that you can all be super together.
• Reflect back on your journey and build energy for your next mission.

Available from Audible and other major audiobook sellers.

Life and Death Design

Emergencies—landing a malfunctioning plane, resuscitating a heart attack victim, or avoiding a head-on car crash—all require split-second decisions that can mean life or death. Fortunately, designers of life-saving products have leveraged research and brain science to help users reduce panic and harness their best instincts. Life and Death Design brings these techniques to everyday designers who want to help their users think clearly and act safely.

The Staff Designer

Staff design is a combination of team leadership and in-the-pixels design work, all without any direct people management. There are tons of management books, but very little help for senior designers who want to keep working with the pixels. Fret not: this handbook will guide you to success — whether you’re already navigating a Staff Design role, or you’re an Independent Contributor deciding whether or not to embark on the journey. You’ll learn methods to build influence as an individual contributor, improve your executive communication, and impact strategy at scale.

Take-aways

• Understand Staff Designer roles and responsibilities, including how they differ from Senior Designers, to set appropriate expectations with teams and executives.
• Enhance executive communication skills and cross-team collaboration to influence company vision and roadmap at a strategic level.
• Develop effective time management and boundary-setting strategies to sustainably focus on high-impact, strategic work.

The User Experience Team of One (2nd Edition)

Whether you’re new to UX or a seasoned practitioner, The User Experience Team of One gives you everything you need to succeed, emphasizing down-to-earth approaches that deliver big impact over time-consuming, needlessly complex techniques. This updated classic remains a comprehensive and essential guide for UX and product designers everywhere—you’ll accomplish a lot more with a lot less.

Who Should Read This Book

The techniques and advice in this book are applicable to anyone who is just starting out in user experience, as well as seasoned practitioners who have been in the field for years. In addition, anyone who read the first edition will appreciate this updated edition that features loads of new material that has changed over the past 10 years. There are tips, tools, and techniques throughout the book to improve your performance. The various methods detail exactly how to handle a variety of situations—from the timing involved, the materials, when to use that information, and how to try it out. Look for real-life sidebars from the authors, as well as experts in the field. This book applies to a team of one or a team of many.

Takeaways

• The first section covers the philosophy of the UX team of one—why you do it, how you build support, how to identify common challenges, and how to keep growing.
• The second section of the book, “Practice,” gives you tools and techniques for managing this balancing act with detailed methods.
• The 25 up-to-date methods in Part II prompt a question about a specific topic, answer the question, give the average time it will take to deal with the issue, tell you when to use this material, and give you instructions for “Trying It Out.”
• You can learn about the working conditions that a team of one often experiences.
• The book addresses difficult situations that UX practitioners often encounter (for example, the need for speed in corporate environments).
• Be sure to review the UX Value Loop[TM] that Joe created to define UX.
• Check out sidebars that highlight some of Joe and Leah’s personal real-life experiences.
• The end of each chapter tells you what to do if you can “only do one thing”.
• Finally, notes and tips give you handy techniques and tools to use in your own practice.

Available from Audible and other major audiobook sellers.