Remote Research: Real Users, Real Time, Real Research


Nate Bolt - 2010
    In Remote Research, Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte teach you how to design and conduct remote research studies, top to bottom, with little more than a phone and a laptop. TESTIMONIALS "Nate and Tony have done it! They've described beautifully one of the user experience profession's best-kept secrets-conducting remote usability tests. This book is a must-have for anyone thinking about remote testing, since it tackles everything you need from soup to nuts. I can't wait to get a copy for my own bookshelf. Oh, it also will melt your face remotely." ?Jared Spool CEO and Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering "Remote Research is filled with sage advice, entertaining case studies, methods, and clear procedures that will benefit both new and experienced user researchers. Remote Research is an absorbing book that should be on the reading list of every user researcher. Kudos to Bolt and Tulathimutte for an engaging and informative guide to better remote research." ?Chauncey Wilson Senior Manager, AEC User Research, Autodesk, Inc. "The techniques in this book will make every designer's and user researcher's life much easier. Nate and Tony use the attitude and power of Web 2.0 technologies to create a new way of thinking about user experience research. They share their expertise clearly, concisely, and with a great sense of humor, giving practitioners step-by-step details to conduct remote research of virtually any complexity." ?Mike Kuniavsky author, Observing the User Experience "No longer must you only test your interfaces with people who come to your office or some expensive lab. So stop doing boring research! Stop having a boring life! Read this book!" ?Mark Trammell User Researcher, Twitter

Storytelling For User Experience: Crafting Stories For Better Design


Whitney Quesenbery - 2010
    In user experience, stories help us to understand our users, learn about their goals, explain our research, and demonstrate our design ideas. In this book, Quesenbery and Brooks teach you how to craft and tell your own unique stories to improve your designs.

Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior


Indi Young - 2008
    One of the best ways is to understand users' reasons for doing things. Mental Models gives you the tools to help you grasp, and design for, those reasons. Adaptive Path co-founder Indi Young has written a roll-up-your-sleeves book for designers, managers, and anyone else interested in making design strategic, and successful.

Prototyping: A Practitioner's Guide


Todd Zaki Warfel - 2009
    Prototypes help you to flesh out design ideas, test assumptions, and gather real-time feedback from users. With this book, Todd Zaki Warfel shows how prototypes are more than just a design tool by demonstrating how they can help you market a product, gain internal buy-in, and test feasibility with your development team. TESTIMONIALS "When someone asks me about prototyping, I'll be pointing them to this book from now on." â��Kim Goodwin: VP Design, Cooper; author, Designing for the Digital Age "Todd's text offers a comprehensive view of prototyping--from the role of prototypes in socializing decision making and achieving organizational buy-in, to the actual pragmatics of creating interactive artifacts. This is a solid book for those 'in the trenches'--the designers doing the actual work that ends up in the actual products we use every day." â��Jon Kolko: Editor-in-Chief, interactions; Associate Creative Director, Frog "If you design applications and are stuck in the land of task flows and wireframes, you really need to pick up a copy of Prototyping: A Practitioner's Guide. Todd offers practical, hands-on advice to jump start your prototyping and make your designs truly interactive before they are built." â��Dan Saffer: Principal, Kicker Studios; author of Designing for Interaction and Designing Gestural Interfaces "Whether you're prototyping to explore ideas or to communicate them, Todd Zaki Warfel's smart, accessible guide will give you the tools you need." â��Jesse James Garrett: Author, The Elements of User Experience; President, Adaptive Path

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites


Peter Morville - 1998
    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.

A Web for Everyone: Designing Accessible User Experiences


Sarah Horton - 2013
    Rooted in universal design principles, this book provides solutions: practical advice and examples of how to create sites that everyone can use.

Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services


Kim Goodwin - 2009
    Designing successful products and services in the digital age requires a multi-disciplinary team with expertise in interaction design, visual design, industrial design, and other disciplines. It also takes the ability to come up with the big ideas that make a desirable product or service, as well as the skill and perseverance to execute on the thousand small ideas that get your design into the hands of users. It requires expertise in project management, user research, and consensus-building. This comprehensive, full-color volume addresses all of these and more with detailed how-to information, real-life examples, and exercises. Topics include assembling a design team, planning and conducting user research, analyzing your data and turning it into personas, using scenarios to drive requirements definition and design, collaborating in design meetings, evaluating and iterating your design, and documenting finished design in a way that works for engineers and stakeholders alike.

The Mobile Frontier: A Guide for Designing Mobile Experiences


Rachel Hinman - 2012
    Untethered from a keyboard and mouse, this rich design space is ripe with opportunities to invent new and more human ways for people to interact with information. The Mobile Frontier will help you navigate this unfamiliar and fast-changing landscape, and inspire you to explore the possibilities that mobile technology presents.

Why We Fail: Learning From Experience Design Failures


Victor Lombardi - 2013
    But this book offers more. It provides important insights into both what can go right and what can go wrong in a product offering. To make great products, we need to understand what makes some fail and others succeed. To all the aspiring, young entrepreneurs who are reading this: take heed. Embrace failure to learn from failure. Learn from failure to avoid failure." —Don Norman Co-founder, Nielsen Norman Group Author of The Design of Everyday Things (Revised and Expanded) Just as pilots and doctors improve by studying crash reports and postmortems, experience designers can improve by learning how customer experience failures cause products to fail in the marketplace. Rather than proselytizing a particular approach to design, Why We Fail holistically explores what teams actually built, why the products failed, and how we can learn from the past to avoid failure ourselves.Why We Fail will help you:1. Understand the key mistakes other teams have made so you don't repeat them2. Turn unavoidable failures into building blocks to be successful3. Create a team environment where failures are controlled and valuable

Design Is the Problem


Nathan Shedroff - 2008
    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 User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide


Leah Buley - 2013
    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.

Card Sorting


Donna Spencer - 2009
    It helps you create information that is easy to find and understand. In "Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories," Donna Spencer shows you how to plan and run a card sort, analyze the results, and apply the outcomes to your projects. TESTIMONIALS "This is a wonderful book on a much-needed topic. While card sorting is a basic tool of the trade, it's previously received short-shrift in any practical publication. Donna's done an amazing job explaining (in easy-to-understand terms) what every designer, architect, and researcher should know about the ins-and-outs of card sorting. (You might need to buy two copies, because I guarantee someone will borrow your first copy and never return it.)" â��Jared M. Spool, CEO and Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering "This book is a fresh, clear, practical explanation of the value of card-sorting, how to do it, and how to use the results. Spencer mixes step-by-step instructions and good examples with just enough theory. You'll emerge from this book with new skills to create great user-centered information architectures--and smart responses to tricky questions from pesky stakeholders." â��Tamara Adlin, Founding Partner, Fell Swoop, and co-author of The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design "I wish we had this book when we first started doing card sorting. It's a fantastic handbook that is full of very practical advice and examples from Donna's extensive experience. We will be recommending it to all our customers." â��Sam Ng, Creator of online card sorting tool OptimalSort "Donna has put together the definitive work on card sorting, a must have tool for all information architects. If you want to plan, run and analyse your own card sorts, this book has it all." â��Andy Budd, User Experience Director, Clearleft

Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices


Dan Saffer - 2006
    While other books on this subject are either aimed at more seasoned practitioners or else are too focused on a particular medium like software, this guide will take a more holistic approach to the discipline, looking at interaction design for the Web, software, and devices. It is the only interaction design book that is coming from a designers point of view rather than that of an engineer. This much-needed guide is more than just a how-to manual. It covers interaction design fundamentals, approaches to designing, design research, and more, and spans all mediums Internet, software, and devices. Even robots! Filled with tips, real-world projects, and interviews, you ll get a solid grounding in everything you need to successfully tackle interaction design. Designing for Interaction is an AIGA Design Press book, published under Peachpit's New Riders imprint in partnership with AIGA."

Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences


Andrea Resmini - 2011
    It offers insights about trade-offs that can be made and techniques for even the most unique design challenges. The book will help readers master agile information structures while meeting their unique needs on such devices as smart phones, GPS systems, and tablets.The book provides examples showing how to: model and shape information to adapt itself to users' needs, goals, and seeking strategies; reduce disorientation and increase legibility and way-finding in digital and physical spaces; and alleviate the frustration associated with choosing from an ever-growing set of information, services, and goods. It also describes relevant connections between pieces of information, services and goods to help users achieve their goals.This book will be of value to practitioners, researchers, academics, andstudents in user experience design, usability, information architecture, interaction design, HCI, web interaction/interface designer, mobile application design/development, and information design. Architects and industrial designers moving into the digital realm will also find this book helpful.

Build Better Products


Laura Klein - 2016
    But developing a great product that people actually want to buy and use is another story. Build Better Products is a hands-on, step-by-step guide that helps teams incorporate strategy, empathy, design, and analytics into their development process. You’ll learn to develop products and features that improve your business’s bottom line while dramatically improving customer experience."Laura Klein’s new techniques for understanding customers work for both startups and big companies. And following her own advice, she shows us how to do it, and doesn’t just tell." — Ken Norton, Partner, GV