We’re building more products than ever before, but most of them fail—not because we can’t complete what we set out to build, but because we waste time, money, and effort building the wrong product.What we need is a systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success. That’s the promise of Running Lean.In this inspiring book, Ash Maurya takes you through an exacting strategy for achieving a "product/market fit" for your fledgling venture, based on his own experience in building a wide array of products from high-tech to no-tech. Throughout, he builds on the ideas and concepts of several innovative methodologies, including the Lean Startup, Customer Development, and bootstrapping.Running Lean is an ideal tool for business managers, CEOs, small business owners, developers and programmers, and anyone who’s interested in starting a business project.Find a problem worth solving, then define a solutionEngage your customers throughout the development cycleContinually test your product with smaller, faster iterationsBuild a feature, measure customer response, and verify/refute the ideaKnow when to "pivot" by changing your plan’s courseMaximize your efforts for speed, learning, and focusLearn the ideal time to raise your "big round" of fundingGet on track with The Lean Series Presented by Eric Ries—bestselling author of The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses—The Lean Series gives you solid footing in a proven methodology that will help your business succeed.

    Master the 3 C's of Head-Turning Design!Cover your basics with the book that covers everything from typography and color to layout and business issues! Jim Krause, author of the popular Index series, guides you through the understanding and practice of the three elements every successful visual design must have:Components: Learn how to get the most out of the photos, illustrations, icons, typography, linework, decoration, borders and backgrounds you use within your design.Composition: Practice combining the components of a design in a visually appealing way by using the principles of placement, grouping, alignment, flow and spacing to create a pleasing, cohesive design.Concept: Utilize the intangible elements of theme, connotation and style to present and deliver your message in a way that will wow your clients every time.Whether you're a new, mid-level or experienced designer who is brainstorming ideas or finalizing your presentation, this handy-to-use, take-it-with-you book will instruct and inspire you to new heights of creativity.

    Three dots to represent Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Three arrows to show direct flights. Problem solved, and the picture made it easy to sell Southwest Airlines to investors and customers. Used properly, a simple drawing on a humble napkin is more powerful than Excel or PowerPoint. It can help crystallize ideas, think outside the box, and communicate in a way that people simply “get”. In this book Dan Roam argues that everyone is born with a talent for visual thinking, even those who swear they can’t draw. Drawing on twenty years of visual problem solving combined with the recent discoveries of vision science, this book shows anyone how to clarify a problem or sell an idea by visually breaking it down using a simple set of visual thinking tools – tools that take advantage of everyone’s innate ability to look, see, imagine, and show. THE BACK OF THE NAPKIN proves that thinking with pictures can help anyone discover and develop new ideas, solve problems in unexpected ways, and dramatically improve their ability to share their insights. This book will help readers literally see the world in a new way.

    Even if you don't immediately recognize his name, you have almost certainly used one of the radios, clocks, lighters, juicers, shelves or hundreds of other products he designed. He is famous not only for this vast array of well-formed products, but for his remarkably prescient ideas about the correct function of design in the messy, out-of-control world we inhabit today. These ideas are summed up in his 'ten principles' of good design: good design is innovative, useful, and aesthetic. Good design should be make a product easily understood. Good design is unobtrusive, honest, durable, thorough, and concerned with the environment. Most of all, good design is as little design as possible.In that spirit, this monograph is as little book as possible. It is a clear, comprehensive and beautiful presentation of Dieter Rams' life and his work. It is a must-have book for anyone interested in Rams' work, his legacy, and his ideas about how to live.

    However, knowing how to bend the rules and make certain grids work for the job at hand takes skill.This book will outline and demonstrate basic layout/grid guidelines and rules through 100 entries including choosing the a typeface for the project, striving for rhythm and balance with type, combining typefaces, using special characters and kerning and legibility. These essentials of grid design are critical to the success of any job.

    Armed with this book, you can confidently tackle difficult activities like telling your boss or client what's wrong with their content, getting the budget to do content work, and aligning stakeholders on a common vision. Reading The Content Strategy Toolkit is like having your own personal consulting firm on retainer with a complete array of tools and tips for every challenge you'll face. In this practical and relevant guide, you'll learn how to: Identify problems with your content and persuade your bosses it's worth the time and resources to do it right Make sense of your business environment and understand your audience Get stakeholders aligned on business goals and user needs Set your content strategy and decide how to measure success Create, maintain, and govern on-strategy content You'll learn to control your content-and not have it control you.

    It’s not a lofty book. It’s an affordable resource that feels like a sit-down with someone who has real answers to share.

    Your product or service works beautifully - but something is missing. People just don’t see the big idea - and it’s keeping you from being successful. Your idea has an explanation problem.The Art of Explanation is for business people, educators and influencers who want to improve their explanation skills and start solving explanation problems.Author Lee LeFever is the founder of Common Craft, a company known around the world for making complex ideas easy to understand through short animated videos. He is your guide to helping audiences fall in love with your ideas, products or services through better explanations in any medium. You will learn to:• Plan: Learn explanation basics, what causes them to fail and how to diagnose explanation problems.• Package: Using simple elements, create an explanation strategy that builds confidence and motivates your audience. • Present: Produce remarkable explanations with visuals and media. The Art of Explanation is your invitation to become an explanation specialist and see why explanation is now a fundamental skill for professionals.

    It is also the most powerful, and in some ways, the most confusing. What do accessible, content-focused standards-based web designers and front-end developers need to know? And how can we harness the power of HTML5 in today’s browsers?In this brilliant and entertaining user’s guide, Jeremy Keith cuts to the chase, with crisp, clear, practical examples, and his patented twinkle and charm.

    You'll discover the power of storytelling and the way to make data a pivotal point in your story. The lessons in this illuminative text are grounded in theory, but made accessible through numerous real-world examples--ready for immediate application to your next graph or presentation.Storytelling is not an inherent skill, especially when it comes to data visualization, and the tools at our disposal don't make it any easier. This book demonstrates how to go beyond conventional tools to reach the root of your data, and how to use your data to create an engaging, informative, compelling story. Specifically, you'll learn how to:Understand the importance of context and audience Determine the appropriate type of graph for your situation Recognize and eliminate the clutter clouding your information Direct your audience's attention to the most important parts of your data Think like a designer and utilize concepts of design in data visualization Leverage the power of storytelling to help your message resonate with your audience Together, the lessons in this book will help you turn your data into high impact visual stories that stick with your audience. Rid your world of ineffective graphs, one exploding 3D pie chart at a time. There is a story in your data--Storytelling with Data will give you the skills and power to tell it!

    You ll learn how to design products that work well, launch well, are easy to support, easy to use, and don t get in the way of a user s life.Old systems and bad interfaces will plague us if we don t learn how to design for the long term. By writing code that s small instead of large, and making simple systems rather than complex ones, we can begin to design technology that gets out of our way.Discover principles that follow the human lifestyle and environment in mind, allowing technology to amplify humanness instead of taking it awayDelve into types of alerts, product launch, "calming" technology, and tech that smoothly enters people s livesLearn from a trained anthropologist and a technology hobbyist who sits on the edge between technology and how people use itThis book is ideal for anyone who actively builds or makes decisions about technology, including user experience designers, product designers, managers, creative directors, and developers."

    The Persona Lifecycle addresses the how of creating effective personas and using those personas to design products that people love. It doesn't just describe the value of personas; it offers detailed techniques and tools related to planning, creating, communicating, and using personas to create great product designs. Moreover, it provides rich examples, samples, and illustrations to imitate and model. Perhaps most importantly, it positions personas not as a panacea, but as a method used to complement other user-centered design (UCD) techniques including scenario-based design, cognitive walkthroughs and user testing. The authors developed the Persona Lifecycle model to communicate the value and practical application of personas to product design and development professionals.This book explores the complete lifecycle of personas, to guide the designer at each stage of product development. It includes a running case study with rich examples and samples that demonstrate how personas can be used in building a product end-to-end. It also presents recommended best practices in techniques, tools, and innovative methods and contains hundreds of relevant stories, commentary, opinions, and case studies from user experience professionals across a variety of domains and industries.This book will be a valuable resource for UCD professionals, including usability practitioners, interaction designers, technical writers, and program managers; programmers/developers who act as the interaction designers for software; and those professionals who work with developers and designers.

    They yearn to come up with a game—changing innovation like Apple's iPod, or create an entirely new category like Facebook. Many make genuine efforts to be innovative—they spend on R&D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants. But they get disappointing results.Why? In The Design of Business, Roger Martin offers a compelling and provocative answer: we rely far too exclusively on analytical thinking, which merely refines current knowledge, producing small improvements to the status quo.To innovate and win, companies need design thinking. This form of thinking is rooted in how knowledge advances from one stage to another—from mystery (something we can't explain) to heuristic (a rule of thumb that guides us toward solution) to algorithm (a predictable formula for producing an answer) to code (when the formula becomes so predictable it can be fully automated). As knowledge advances across the stages, productivity grows and costs drop-creating massive value for companies.Martin shows how leading companies such as Procter & Gamble, Cirque du Soleil, RIM, and others use design thinking to push knowledge through the stages in ways that produce breakthrough innovations and competitive advantage.Filled with deep insights and fresh perspectives, The Design of Business reveals the true foundation of successful, profitable innovation.

    Two leaders in the requirements community have teamed up to deliver a contemporary set of practices covering the full range of requirements development and management activities on software projects. Describes practical, effective, field-tested techniques for managing the requirements engineering process from end to end. Provides examples demonstrating how requirements "good practices" can lead to fewer change requests, higher customer satisfaction, and lower development costs. Fully updated with contemporary examples and many new practices and techniques. Describes how to apply effective requirements practices to agile projects and numerous other special project situations. Targeted to business analysts, developers, project managers, and other software project stakeholders who have a general understanding of the software development process. Shares the insights gleaned from the authors' extensive experience delivering hundreds of software-requirements training courses, presentations, and webinars.New chapters are included on specifying data requirements, writing high-quality functional requirements, and requirements reuse. Considerable depth has been added on business requirements, elicitation techniques, and nonfunctional requirements. In addition, new chapters recommend effective requirements practices for various special project situations, including enhancement and replacement, packaged solutions, outsourced, business process automation, analytics and reporting, and embedded and other real-time systems projects.

    Each essay distills complex concepts and challenges into practical nuggets of useful advice, and the new edition now adds more value for leaders and managers of projects everywhere. Based on his nine years of experience as a program manager for Internet Explorer, and lead program manager for Windows and MSN, Berkun explains to technical and non-technical readers alike what it takes to get through a large software or web development project. Making Things Happen doesn't cite specific methods, but focuses on philosophy and strategy. Unlike other project management books, Berkun offers personal essays in a comfortable style and easy tone that emulate the relationship of a wise project manager who gives good, entertaining and passionate advice to those who ask. Topics in this new edition include:How to make things happenMaking good decisionsSpecifications and requirementsIdeas and what to do with themHow not to annoy peopleLeadership and trustThe truth about making datesWhat to do when things go wrongComplete with a new forward from the author and a discussion guide for forming reading groups/teams, Making Things Happen offers in-depth exercises to help you apply lessons from the book to your job. It is inspiring, funny, honest, and compelling, and definitely the one book that you and your team need to have within arm's reach throughout the life of your project. Coming from the rare perspective of someone who fought difficult battles on Microsoft's biggest projects and taught project design and management for MSTE, Microsoft's internal best practices group, this is valuable advice indeed. It will serve you well with your current work, and on future projects to come.