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

    It is rather Kenya Haras attempt to explore the essence of White, which he sees as being closely related to the origin of Japanese aesthetics – symbolising simplicity and subtlety. The central concepts discussed by Kenya Hara in this publication are emptiness and the absolute void. Kenya Hara also sees his work as a designer as a form of communication. Good communication has the distinction of being able to listen to each other, rather than to press one's opinion onto the opponent. Kenya Hara compares this form of communication with an “empty container”. In visual communication, there are equally signals whose signification is limited, as well as signals or symbols such as the cross or the red circle on the Japanese flag, which – like an “empty container” – permit every signification and do not limit imagination. Not alone the fact that the Japanese character for white forms a radical of the character for emptiness has prompted him the closely associate the color white with emptiness.

    Focusing on customer needs isn't a nice–to–have, it's a strategic imperative. The Jobs To Be Done Playbook (JTBD) helps organizations turn market insight into action. This book shows you techniques to make offerings people want, as well as make people want your offering.

    

    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.

    Covering history of design, along with current trends, methods for customizing fonts, techniques for setting type, common mistakes to avoid, and guidelines for selecting the right type for the job, the book is fully illustrated with smart, relevant images.

    Why not apply the same approach to overcome challenges in the nonprofit world? This project, funded by International Development Enterprise (IDE) as part of a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, sought to provide NGOs and social enterprises with the tools to do just that. IDEO, in collaboration with nonprofit groups ICRW and Heifer International, developed the HCD Toolkit to help international staff and volunteers understand a community's needs in new ways, find innovative solutions to meet those needs, and deliver solutions with financial sustainability in mind. The HCD Toolkit was designed specifically for NGOs and social enterprises that work with impoverished communities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The free kit, available for download here, walks users through the human-centered design process and supports them in activities such as building listening skills, running workshops, and implementing ideas. The process has led to innovations such as the HeartStart defibrillator, Cleanwell natural antibacterial products, and the Blood Donor System for the Red Cross — all of which have enhanced the lives of millions of people. The HCD toolkit has been used by organizations throughout the developing world, including Acumen Fund, AyurVAID, Heifer International, ICRW, IDE, Micro Drip, and VisionSpring.

    Stylin with CSS teaches you everything you need to know start using CSS in your web development work, from the basics of markup of your content and styling text, through to creating multi-column page layouts without the use of tables. Learn how to create interface components, such as drop-down menus, navigation links, and animated graphical buttons, using only CSS no JavaScript required. Discover how to design code that will work on the latest standard-compliant browsers, while working around the quirks of the older browsers. With a mastery of CSS, your web design capabilities will move to a new level, and everything you need to know to get your started and build your skills is right here in this book. You ll be stylin in no time!"

    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.

    Brands around the world are spending (on average) over 25% of their total marketing budget on content marketing.What's been missing...until now...is the book that tells marketers exactly how to put content marketing to work.Managing Content Marketing shows you, in detail, how to manage content marketing within your organization. Whether you come from a small company or multi-billion dollar brand, this book gives you the ammunition and the ideas to develop a storytelling process that will create passionate subscribers to your brand.World-renowned content marketing experts Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi have teamed up to help marketing pros and business owners develop a content marketing plan that goes beyond theories and explains exactly how to turn that plan into reality.Managing Content Marketing will teach you to: --Build the Business Case for Content Marketing--Develop a Content Marketing Strategy that Works for Your Business--Tell a Consistent Story that Engages Your Customers--Determine the Right Marketing Channels to Implement--Create an Internal and External Workflow for Content Marketing--Measure Content Marketing and Communicate Results to Internal Stakeholders

    Should you wish to adopt a framework or employ a processor to speed up your development process, be our guest. However, this book is not about you; it’s about your audience.The Inclusive Design Patterns book covers all the techniques, gotchas and strategies you need to be aware of when building accessible, inclusive interfaces. We’ll explore the document outline, external links and “skip” links, navigation regions and landmarks, labelling and alternative text for illustrations, buttons, tables of contents, JavaScript patterns, touch targets, filter widgets and infinite scrolling and “load more” button and grid display and dynamic content and tab interfaces and password validation and web forms and error messages — and pretty much anything else you need to know about accessibility, including how to prototype with inclusivity in mind, how to deal with legacy browsers and dozens of practical snippets to use when building inclusive interfaces.

    Others may think of it as the last architectural treatise, for it provides a discursive container for ideas that would otherwise be lost. Whatever genre it belongs to, SITELESS is a new kind of architecture book that seems to have come out of nowhere. Its author, a young French architect practicing in Tokyo, admits he "didn't do this out of reverence toward architecture, but rather out of a profound boredom with the discipline, as a sort of compulsive reaction." What would happen if architects liberated their minds from the constraints of site, program, and budget? he asks. The result is a book that is saturated with forms, and as free of words as any architecture book the MIT Press has ever published.The 1001 building forms in SITELESS include structural parasites, chain link towers, ball bearing floors, corrugated corners, exponential balconies, radial facades, crawling frames, forensic housing--and other architectural ideas that may require construction techniques not yet developed and a relation to gravity not yet achieved. SITELESS presents an open-ended compendium of visual ideas for the architectural imagination to draw from. The forms, drawn freehand (to avoid software-specific shapes) but from a constant viewing angle, are presented twelve to a page, with no scale, order, or end to the series. After setting down 1001 forms in siteless conditions and embryonic stages, Blanciak takes one of the forms and performs a "scale test," showing what happens when one of these fantastic ideas is subjected to the actual constraints of a site in central Tokyo. The book ends by illustrating the potential of these shapes to morph into actual building proportions.

    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."

    But how did they decide on what was good for the rest of us? What did they get right and where have they let us down? And what can we learn from the way these experts think that can help us in how we make decisions in our own lives?In How Design Makes The World, bestselling author and designer Scott Berkun takes readers on a journey exploring how designers of all kinds, from software engineers, to urban planners, have succeeded and failed us. By examining daily experiences like going to work, shopping for food, or even just using social media on their phones, readers will learn to see the world in a new and powerful way. They'll ask better questions of the things they buy, use, and make, and discover how easy it is to use ideas from great designers to improve their everyday lives.

    Something as simple as color choices can render a product unusable for millions. These mismatches are the building blocks of exclusion. In Mismatch, Kat Holmes describes how design can lead to exclusion, and how design can also remedy exclusion. Inclusive design methods--designing objects with rather than for excluded users--can create elegant solutions that work well and benefit all.Holmes tells stories of pioneers of inclusive design, many of whom were drawn to work on inclusion because of their own experiences of exclusion. A gamer and designer who depends on voice recognition shows Holmes his "Wall of Exclusion," which displays dozens of game controllers that require two hands to operate; an architect shares her firsthand knowledge of how design can fail communities, gleaned from growing up in Detroit's housing projects; an astronomer who began to lose her eyesight adapts a technique called "sonification" so she can "listen" to the stars.Designing for inclusion is not a feel-good sideline. Holmes shows how inclusion can be a source of innovation and growth, especially for digital technologies. It can be a catalyst for creativity and a boost for the bottom line as a customer base expands. And each time we remedy a mismatched interaction, we create an opportunity for more people to contribute to society in meaningful ways.