Treat it as the UX expert on your bookshelf that you can read from cover-to-cover, or to dip into as the need arises, regardless of whether you have 'UX' in your job title or not.

    You'll discover how to plan and conduct UX research, analyze data, persuade teams to take action on the results and build a career in UX. The book will help you take a more strategic view of product design so you can focus on optimizing the user's experience. UX Researchers, Designers, Project Managers, Scrum Masters, Business Analysts and Marketing Managers will find tools, inspiration and ideas to rejuvenate their thinking, inspire their team and improve their craft.Key FeaturesA dive-in-anywhere book that offers practical advice and topical examples. 
Thought triggers, exercises and scenarios to test your knowledge of UX research. 　 
Workshop ideas to build a development team's UX maturity. 
War stories from seasoned researchers to show you how UX research methods can be tailored to your own organization.

    With step-by-step guidance, Validating Product Ideas shows you how to tackle the research to build the best possible product.

    Many designers and researchers view usability and design as qualitative activities, which do not require attention to formulas and numbers. However, usability practitioners and user researchers are increasingly expected to quantify the benefits of their efforts. The impact of good and bad designs can be quantified in terms of conversions, completion rates, completion times, perceived satisfaction, recommendations, and sales.The book discusses ways to quantify user research; summarize data and compute margins of error; determine appropriate samples sizes; standardize usability questionnaires; and settle controversies in measurement and statistics. Each chapter concludes with a list of key points and references. Most chapters also include a set of problems and answers that enable readers to test their understanding of the material. This book is a valuable resource for those engaged in measuring the behavior and attitudes of people during their interaction with interfaces.

    You'll get several case studies, including Airbnb, along with interviews with UX strategists from different work environments (startup, agency, and enterprise) about their roles and experience.With this book, UX designers, product stakeholders, and startup founders will learn how to: • Conduct a competitive analysis on the online marketplace• Perform guerrilla user research for your MVP• Design for conversion and develop a funnel matrix for understanding customer acquisition• Extract innovative online opportunities from market research• Validate customer research with continuous feedback loops• Adapt traditional and contemporary business approaches (such as Lean Startup) to implement a successful strategy

    Whether you want to cross over into user experience or you're a seasoned practitioner trying to drag your organization forward, this book gives you tools and insight for doing more with less.

    But with a typical price tag of $5,000 to $10,000 for a usability consultant to conduct each round of tests, it rarely happens. In this how-to companion to Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Steve Krug spells out an approach to usability testing that anyone can easily apply to their own web site, application, or other product. (As he said in Don't Make Me Think, "It's not rocket surgery".)In this new book, Steve explains how to: -Test any design, from a sketch on a napkin to a fully-functioning web site or application-Keep your focus on finding the most important problems (because no one has the time or resources to fix them all)-Fix the problems that you find, using his "The least you can do" approachBy pairing the process of testing and fixing products down to its essentials (A morning a month, that's all we ask ), Rocket Surgery makes it realistic for teams to test early and often, catching problems while it's still easy to fix them. Rocket Surgery Made Easy adds demonstration videos to the proven mix of clear writing, before-and-after examples, witty illustrations, and practical advice that made Don't Make Me Think so popular.

    We want them to buy something, read more, or take action of some kind. Designing without understanding what makes people act the way they do is like exploring a new city without a map: results will be haphazard, confusing, and inefficient. This book combines real science and research with practical examples to deliver a guide every designer needs. With it you'll be able to design more intuitive and engaging work for print, websites, applications, and products that matches the way people think, work, and play.Learn to increase the effectiveness, conversion rates, and usability of your own design projects by finding the answers to questions such as: What grabs and holds attention on a page or screen?What makes memories stick?What is more important, peripheral or central vision?How can you predict the types of errors that people will make?What is the limit to someone's social circle?How do you motivate people to continue on to (the next step?What line length for text is best?Are some fonts better than others? These are just a few of the questions that the book answers in its deep-dive exploration of what makes people tick.

    We're rebelling against technology that's too complicated, DVD players with too many menus, and software accompanied by 75-megabyte "read me" manuals. The iPod's clean gadgetry has made simplicity hip. But sometimes we find ourselves caught up in the simplicity paradox: we want something that's simple and easy to use, but also does all the complex things we might ever want it to do. In The Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda offers ten laws for balancing simplicity and complexity in business, technology, and design—guidelines for needing less and actually getting more.Maeda—a professor in MIT's Media Lab and a world-renowned graphic designer—explores the question of how we can redefine the notion of "improved" so that it doesn't always mean something more, something added on.Maeda's first law of simplicity is "Reduce." It's not necessarily beneficial to add technology features just because we can. And the features that we do have must be organized (Law 2) in a sensible hierarchy so users aren't distracted by features and functions they don't need. But simplicity is not less just for the sake of less. Skip ahead to Law 9: "Failure: Accept the fact that some things can never be made simple." Maeda's concise guide to simplicity in the digital age shows us how this idea can be a cornerstone of organizations and their products—how it can drive both business and technology. We can learn to simplify without sacrificing comfort and meaning, and we can achieve the balance described in Law 10. This law, which Maeda calls "The One," tells us: "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful."

    Spanning over a century of sweeping changes, from women's rights to the Great Depression to World War II to the rise of the digital era, this book unpacks the ways in which the world has been--and continues to be--remade according to the principles of the once-obscure discipline of user-experience design.In this essential text, Kuang and Fabricant map the hidden rules of the designed world and shed light on how those rules have caused our world to change--an underappreciated but essential history that's pieced together for the first time. Combining the expertise and insight of a leading journalist and a pioneering designer, User Friendly provides a definitive, thoughtful, and practical perspective on a topic that has rapidly gone from arcane to urgent to inescapable. In User Friendly, Kuang and Fabricant tell the whole story for the first time--and you'll never interact with technology the same way again.

    Empathy is a mindset that focuses on people, helping you to understand their thinking patterns and perspectives. Practical Empathy will show you how to gather and compare these patterns to make better decisions, improve your strategy, and collaborate successfully.

    They explore each metric, considering best methods for collecting, analyzing, and presenting the data. They provide step-by-step guidance for measuring the usability of any type of product using any type of technology.This book is recommended for usability professionals, developers, programmers, information architects, interaction designers, market researchers, and students in an HCI or HFE program.

    How do you present large volumes of information to people who need to find what they're looking for quickly? This classic primer shows information architects, designers, and web site developers how to build large-scale and maintainable web sites that are appealing and easy to navigate. The new edition is thoroughly updated to address emerging technologies -- with recent examples, new scenarios, and information on best practices -- while maintaining its focus on fundamentals. With topics that range from aesthetics to mechanics, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web explains how to create interfaces that users can understand right away. Inside, you'll find:* An overview of information architecture for both newcomers and experienced practitioners* The fundamental components of an architecture, illustrating the interconnected nature of these systems. Updated, with updates for tagging, folksonomies, social classification, and guided navigation* Tools, techniques, and methods that take you from research to strategy and design to implementation. This edition discusses blueprints, wireframes and the role of diagrams in the design phase* A series of short essays that provide practical tips and philosophical advice for those who work on information architecture* The business context of practicing and promoting information architecture, including recent lessons on how to handle enterprise architecture* Case studies on the evolution of two large and very different information architectures, illustrating best practices along the way* How do you document the rich interfaces of web applications? How do you design for multiple platforms and mobile devices? With emphasis on goals and approaches over tactics or technologies, this enormously popular book gives you knowledge about information architecture with a framework that allows you to learn new approaches -- and unlearn outmoded ones.

    The ability to effectively articulate design decisions is critical to the success of a project, because the most articulate person often wins. This practical book provides principles, tactics, and actionable methods for talking about designs with executives, managers, developers, marketers, and other stakeholders who have influence over the project with the goal of winning them over and creating the best user experience.

    Development activities are linked via handoffs between stages as practitioners move through the process. The lifecycle template concept introduced in this book can be tailored to any project environment, from large enterprise system development to commercial products. Whether a student or practitioner, you will come away with knowledge and understanding of how to create and refine interaction designs to ensure a quality user experience.