But what’s in it for you? And if you’re not a content strategist, why should you care?Because even if content strategy isn’t your job, content’s probably your problem-and probably more than you think. You or your business has a message you want to deliver, right? You can deliver that message through various channels and content types, from Tweets to testimonials and photo galleries galore, and your audience has just as many ways of engaging with it. So many ways, so much content… so where’s the problem? That is the problem. And you can measure it in time, creativity, money, lost opportunity, and the sobs you hear equally from creative directors, project managers, and search engine marketing specialists.The solution is content strategy, and this book offers real-world examples and approaches you can adopt, no matter your role on the team. Put content strategy to work for you by gathering this book into your little hands and gobbling up never-before seen case studies from teams at Johns Hopkins Medicine, MINI, Icebreaker, and more. Content Strategy at Work is a book for designers, information architects, copywriters, project managers, and anyone who works with visual or verbal content. It discusses how you can communicate and forge a plan that will enable you, your company, or your client get that message across and foster better user experiences.

    Everyone can ask questions, right? Unfortunately, that's not the case. Interviewing Users provides invaluable interviewing techniques and tools that enable you to conduct informative interviews with anyone. You'll move from simply gathering data to uncovering powerful insights about people.Interviewing Users will explain how to succeed with interviewing, including:* Embracing how other people see the world* Building rapport to create engaging and exciting interactions* Listening in order to build rapport.With this book, Steve Portigal uses stories and examples from his 15 years of experience to show how interviewing can be incorporated into the design process, helping you learn the best and right information to inform and inspire your design.

    This practical guide shows you how to design these types of products for users seeking to take action and achieve specific goals.Stephen Wendel, HelloWallet’s head researcher, takes you step-by-step through the process of applying behavioral economics and psychology to the practical problems of product design and development. Using a combination of lean and agile development methods, you’ll learn a simple iterative approach for identifying target users and behaviors, building the product, and gauging its effectiveness. Discover how to create easy-to-use products to help people make positive changes.Learn the three main strategies to help people change behaviorIdentify your target audience and the behaviors they seek to changeExtract user stories and identify obstacles to behavior changeDevelop effective interface designs that are enjoyable to useMeasure your product’s impact and learn ways to improve itUse practical examples from products like Nest, Fitbit, and Opower

    Service Design is a bit of a buzzword these days and has gained a lot of interest from various fields. This book, assembled to describe and illustrate the emerging field of service design, was brought together using exactly the same co-creative and user-centred approaches you can read and learn about inside. The boundaries between products and services are blurring and it is time for a different way of thinking: this is service design thinking.A set of 23 international authors and even more online contributors from the global service design community invested their knwoledge, experience and passion together to create this book. It introduces service design thinking in a manner accessible to beginners and students, it broadens the knowledge and can act as a resource for experienced design professionals.

    The Google Story takes you deep inside the company's wild ride from an idea that struggled for funding in 1998 to a firm that rakes in billions in profits, making Brin and Page the wealthiest young men in America. Based on scrupulous research and extraordinary access to Google, this fast-moving narrative reveals how an unorthodox management style and culture of innovation enabled a search engine to shake up Madison Avenue and Wall Street, scoop up YouTube, and battle Microsoft at every turn. Not afraid of controversy, Google is expanding in Communist China and quietly working on a searchable genetic database, initiatives that test the founders' guiding mantra: DON'T BE EVIL.

    Crossing the Chasm has become the bible for bringing cutting-edge products to progressively larger markets. This edition provides new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing, with special emphasis on the Internet. It's essential reading for anyone with a stake in the world's most exciting marketplace.

    Everyone wants them, whether to sell more products, spread good ideas, or win more funding. In our busy digital world, the way to results is influencing people on the web. But how?An ad campaign won't cut it. A Twitter account doesn't guarantee it. Manipulative tricks will backfire. Instead, you need quality, compelling web content that attracts people and engages them for the long haul.Clout explains the key principles of influence and how to apply them to web content. Along the way, those principles come to life with lots of practical examples. With this book, you'll: Discover why a technology feature, marketing campaign, SEO effort, or redesign aren't enough to influence online. Understand the business value of compelling web content. Learn 8 principles for influence from the art of rhetoric and the science of psychology. Find out what context is and why it's so important to influence. Jump start your planning for content over time with patterns and diagrams. Learn the basics of evaluation to determine whether your web content is making a difference.

     In an incredibly entertaining and inspiring narrative that draws on countless stories from their work at IDEO, the Stanford d.school, and with many of the world's top companies, David and Tom Kelley identify the principles and strategies that will allow us to tap into our creative potential in our work lives, and in our personal lives, and allow us to innovate in terms of how we approach and solve problems.  It is a book that will help each of us be more productive and successful in our lives and in our careers.

    That's why we created Digital Adaptation, a new practical book on how to help senior management understand the Web and adapt the business, culture, teams and workflows accordingly. No fluff, no theory — just techniques and strategies that worked in practice, and showed results. The book will help traditional businesses and organizations to overcome their legacy, and help you plant the seeds of change with very little power. If you do want to finally see changes happening, this is the book to grab. Written by Paul Boag. Designed by Veerle Pieters. 176 pages. YOU'LL LEARN TO: • Tackle bureaucracy and overcome legacy culture, • Develop a flexible and effective digital strategy, • Use responsibility matrix to minimize delays and costs, • Adopt a digital culture and become digital by default, • Apply techniques from mid-sized and large organizations, • Avoid toxic working practices and improve internal processes, • Organize teams and boost their efficiency, • Embrace social media and use them effectively, • Understand the value of a digital team and invest in them, • Break down the walls and nourish collaboration, ownership and innovation.

    The term 'hacker' has been redefined to consist of anyone who has an insatiable curiosity as to how things work--and how they can try to make them better. This book is aimed at hackers of all skill levels and explains the classical principles and techniques behind beautiful designs by deconstructing those designs in order to understand what makes them so remarkable. Author and designer David Kadavy provides you with the framework for understanding good design and places a special emphasis on interactive mediums. You'll explore color theory, the role of proportion and geometry in design, and the relationship between medium and form. Packed with unique reverse engineering design examples, this book inspires and encourages you to discover and create new beauty in a variety of formats. Breaks down and studies the classical principles and techniques behind the creation of beautiful design. Illustrates cultural and contextual considerations in communicating to a specific audience. Discusses why design is important, the purpose of design, the various constraints of design, and how today's fonts are designed with the screen in mind. Dissects the elements of color, size, scale, proportion, medium, and form. Features a unique range of examples, including the graffiti in the ancient city of Pompeii, the lack of the color black in Monet's art, the style and sleekness of the iPhone, and more.By the end of this book, you'll be able to apply the featured design principles to your own web designs, mobile apps, or other digital work.

    Creativity, Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation—into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about how to build a creative culture—but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, “an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.” For nearly twenty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner thirty Academy Awards. The joyousness of the storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, in this book, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable.   As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah, where many computer science pioneers got their start, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the thirteen movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as:   • Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. • If you don’t strive to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead. • It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them. • The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them. • A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody. • Do not assume that general agreement will lead to change—it takes substantial energy to move a group, even when all are on board.

    Ideas for new businesses, solutions to the world's problems, and artistic breakthroughs are common, but great execution is rare. According to Scott Belsky, the capacity to make ideas happen can be developed by anyone willing to develop their organizational habits and leadership capability. That's why he founded Behance, a company that helps creative people and teams across industries develop these skills. Belsky has spent six years studying the habits of creative people and teams that are especially productive-the ones who make their ideas happen time and time again. After interviewing hundreds of successful creatives, he has compiled their most powerful-and often counterintuitive-practices, such as: •Generate ideas in moderation and kill ideas liberally •Prioritize through nagging •Encourage fighting within your team While many of us obsess about discovering great new ideas, Belsky shows why it's better to develop the capacity to make ideas happen-a capacity that endures over time.

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    But it's worse when people inside these companies can't pinpoint the problem because they're too focused on business processes. This practical book shows your company how to use alignment diagrams to turn valuable customer observations into actionable insight. With this unique tool, you can visually map your existing customer experience and envision future solutions.Product and brand managers, marketing specialists, and business owners will learn how experience diagramming can help determine where business goals and customer perspectives intersect. Once you're armed with this data, you can provide users with real value.Mapping Experiences is divided into three parts:Understand the underlying principles of diagramming, and discover how these diagrams can inform strategyLearn how to create diagrams with the four iterative modes in the mapping process: setting up a mapping initiative, investigating the evidence, visualizing the process, and using diagrams in workshops and experimentsSee key diagrams in action, including service blueprints, customer journey maps, experience maps, mental models, and spatial maps and ecosystem models