Book picks similar to
The Tao of User Experience by Robert Hoekman Jr.
design
ux
ux-design
software-development
Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
Paul Graham - 2004
Who are these people, what motivates them, and why should you care?Consider these facts: Everything around us is turning into computers. Your typewriter is gone, replaced by a computer. Your phone has turned into a computer. So has your camera. Soon your TV will. Your car was not only designed on computers, but has more processing power in it than a room-sized mainframe did in 1970. Letters, encyclopedias, newspapers, and even your local store are being replaced by the Internet.Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham, explains this world and the motivations of the people who occupy it. In clear, thoughtful prose that draws on illuminating historical examples, Graham takes readers on an unflinching exploration into what he calls “an intellectual Wild West.”The ideas discussed in this book will have a powerful and lasting impact on how we think, how we work, how we develop technology, and how we live. Topics include the importance of beauty in software design, how to make wealth, heresy and free speech, the programming language renaissance, the open-source movement, digital design, internet startups, and more.
The Jobs To Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs
Jim Kalbach - 2020
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.
Grokking Simplicity: Taming complex software with functional thinking
Eric Normand - 2019
Grokking Simplicity is a friendly, practical guide that will change the way you approach software design and development. It introduces a unique approach to functional programming that explains why certain features of software are prone to complexity, and teaches you the functional techniques you can use to simplify these systems so that they’re easier to test and debug.
Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams
Richard Banfield - 2017
Yet, managing human beings and navigating complex product roadmaps is no easy task, and it's rare to find a product leader who can steward a digital product from concept to launch without a couple of major hiccups. Why do some product leaders succeed while others don't?This insightful book presents interviews with nearly 100 leading product managers from all over the world. Authors Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, and Nate Walkingshaw draw on decades of experience in product design and development to capture the approaches, styles, insights, and techniques of successful product managers. If you want to understand what drives good product leaders, this book is an irreplaceable resource.In three parts, Product Leadership helps you explore:Themes and patterns of successful teams and their leaders, and ways to attain those characteristicsThe best approaches for guiding your product team through the startup, emerging, and enterprise stages of a company's evolutionStrategies and tactics for working with customers, agencies, partners, and external stakeholders
Rise of the DEO: Leadership by Design
Maria Giudice - 2013
This environment of constant change will only accelerate in the future and traditional business leaders are ill equipped to deal with it. Just as we took our cues from MBAs and the military in casting the ideal CEO of the 20th century, we can look to design - in its broadest form - to model our future leader, the DEO. These leaders possess characteristics, behaviors and mindsets that allow them to excel in unpredictable, fast-moving and value-charged conditions. They are catalysts for transformation and agents of change. A hybrid of strategic business executive and creative problem-solver, the DEO is willing to take on anything as an object of design and looks at ALL problems as design challenges. Readers will learn not only why this form of leadership is essential to the success of modern organizations, but also what characteristics are best suited to this role. Through intimate conversations with leading DEOs, we explore the mindsets, communities, processes and practices common to creative business leaders. The book lays out--graphically and through example--how DEOs run their companies and why this approach makes sense now. We help readers identify these skills in themselves and their colleagues, and we guide them in using these skills to build, revive or reinvent the next generation of great companies and organization.
Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps
Josh Clark - 2010
Set your app apart with elegant design, efficient usability, and a healthy dose of personality. This accessible, well-written guide shows you how to design exceptional user experiences for the iPhone and iPod Touch through practical principles and a rich collection of visual examples.Whether you're a designer, programmer, manager, or marketer, Tapworthy teaches you to "think iPhone" and helps you ask the right questions -- and get the right answers -- throughout the design process. You'll explore how considerations of design, psychology, culture, ergonomics, and usability combine to create a tapworthy app. Along the way, you'll get behind-the-scenes insights from the designers of apps like Facebook, USA Today, Twitterrific, and many others.Develop your ideas from initial concept to finished designBuild an effortless user experience that rewards every tapExplore the secrets of designing for touchDiscover how and why people really use iPhone appsLearn to use iPhone controls the Apple wayCreate your own personality-packed visuals
Beautiful Evidence
Edward R. Tufte - 2006
Beautiful Evidence is about how seeing turns into showing, how data and evidence turn into explanation. The book identifies excellent and effective methods for showing nearly every kind of information, suggests many new designs (including sparklines), and provides analytical tools for assessing the credibility of evidence presentations (which are seen from both sides: how to produce and how to consume presentations). For alert consumers of presentations, there are chapters on diagnosing evidence corruption and PowerPoint pitches. Beautiful Evidence concludes with two chapters that leave the world of pixel and paper flatland representations - and move onto seeing and thinking in space land, the real-land of three-space and time.
The Imposter's Handbook
Rob Conery - 2016
New languages, new frameworks, new ways of doing things - a constant struggle just to stay current in the industry. This left no time to learn the foundational concepts and skills that come with a degree in Computer Science.
The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
Dan Roam - 2008
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.
Web Hacking 101
Peter Yaworski
With few exceptions, existing books are overly technical, only dedicate a single chapter to website vulnerabilities or don't include any real world examples. This book is different.Using publicly disclosed vulnerabilities, Web Hacking 101 explains common web vulnerabilities and will show you how to start finding vulnerabilities and collecting bounties. With over 30 examples, the book covers topics like:HTML InjectionCross site scripting (XSS)Cross site request forgery (CSRF)Open RedirectsRemote Code Execution (RCE)Application Logicand more...Each example includes a classification of the attack, a report link, the bounty paid, easy to understand description and key takeaways. After reading this book, your eyes will be opened to the wide array of vulnerabilities that exist and you'll likely never look at a website or API the same way.
A Smarter Way to Learn HTML & CSS: Learn it faster. Remember it longer.
Mark Myers - 2015
Short chapters are paired with free interactive online exercises to teach the fundamentals of HTML and CSS. Written for beginners, useful for experienced developers who want to sharpen their skills. Prepares the reader to code a website of medium complexity. The learner spends two to three times as long practicing as he does reading. Based on cognitive research showing that retention increases 400 percent when learners are challenged to retrieve the information they just read. Explanations are in plain, nontechnical English that people of all backgrounds can readily understand. With ample coding examples and illustrations.
Bandit Algorithms for Website Optimization
John Myles White - 2012
Author John Myles White shows you how this powerful class of algorithms can help you boost website traffic, convert visitors to customers, and increase many other measures of success.This is the first developer-focused book on bandit algorithms, which were previously described only in research papers. You’ll quickly learn the benefits of several simple algorithms—including the epsilon-Greedy, Softmax, and Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithms—by working through code examples written in Python, which you can easily adapt for deployment on your own website.Learn the basics of A/B testing—and recognize when it’s better to use bandit algorithmsDevelop a unit testing framework for debugging bandit algorithmsGet additional code examples written in Julia, Ruby, and JavaScript with supplemental online materials
Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design
Khoi Vinh - 2010
In recent years, web designers, too, have come to discover the remarkable power that grid-based design can afford in creating intuitive, immersive, and beautiful user experiences. "Ordering Disorder" delivers a definitive take on grids and the Web. It provides both the big ideas and the brass-tacks techniques of grid-based design. Readers are sure to come away with a keen understanding of the power of grids, as well as the design tools needed to implement them for the World Wide Web. Khoi Vinh is internationally recognized for bringing the tried-and-true principles of the typographic grid to the World Wide Web. He is the former Design Director for NYTimes.com, where he consolidated his reputation for superior user experience design. He writes and lectures widely on design, technology, and culture, and has published the popular blog Subtraction.com for over a decade. More information at grids.subtraction.com"
The REST API Design Handbook
George Reese - 2012
The RESTful approach to web services design is rapidly become the approach of choice. Unfortunately, too few people have truly solid REST API design skills, and discussions of REST can become bogged down in dry theory.The REST API Design Handbook is a simple, practical guide to aid software engineers and software architects create lasting, scalable APIs based on REST architectural principles. The book provides a sound foundation in discussing the constraints that define a REST API. It quickly goes beyond that into the practical aspects of implementing such an API in the real world.Written by cloud computing expert George Reese, The REST API Design Handbook reflects hands on work in consuming many different third party APIs as well the development of REST-based web services APIs. It addresses all of the debates the commonly arise while creating these APIs. Subjects covered include:* REST architectural constraints* Using HTTP methods and response codes in an API* Authenticating RESTful API calls* Versioning* Asynchronous Operations* Pagination and Streaming* Polling and Push Notifications* Rate Limiting
The Shape of Design
Frank Chimero - 2012
My name's Frank Chimero. I've spent the better part of the last two years writing and speaking on design and thinking about the topics that orbit the practice: storytelling, concept, craft, and improvisation. I want to take all of the ideas I've had and connected these past few months and capture them in a book format.I've been teaching for the past 5 years, and I've always been a bit frustrated that there isn't a nice, concise book that overviews the mental state of a successful designer while they go through their creative process. For instance, many say that graphic design is visual communication. A cornerstone of communication is storytelling, and yet you'd be hard-pressed to find any discussion of how to tell stories with design in any design book. This should be remedied.There are new challenges in the world that need to be discussed, and I think design is a prime lens to consider these topics. As our world moves faster and as things become less stable, it becomes more important for individuals to embrace ambiguity, understand paradox, and realize that two things can conflict and still somehow both be true. We must realize that logic doesn't always work, and that sometimes nonsense is the best answer. These are the topics I intend to address in the book.The Shape of Design isn't going to be a text book. The project will be focused on Why instead of How. We have enough How; it's time for a thoughtful analysis of our practice and its characteristics so we can better practice our craft. After reading the book, I want you to look at what you do in a whole new light. Design is more than working for clients.But really, this book aims to look at the mindset and worldview that designing develops in order to answer one big, important question: How can we make things that help all of us live better?"