Meeting Design will teach you the design principles and innovative approaches you’ll need to transform meetings from boring to creative, from wasteful to productive. Meetings can and should be indispensable to your organization; Kevin Hoffman will show you how to design them for success.

    People unconsciously perform ultraordinary actions every day, from throwing a jacket over a chair back to claim the seat, or placing something in the teeth when all hands are full. These "thoughtless acts" reveal the subtle but crucial ways people behave in a world not always perfectly tailored to their needs. Thoughtless Acts? is a collection of dozens of (often humorous) snapshots capturing such fleeting adaptations and minor exploitations. This method of observation demonstrates the kind of common-sense approach that can inspire designers and anyone involved in creative endeavors. Thoughtless Acts? is a privileged peek at how IDEO creates the people-friendly products, services, and spaces for which they are so widely recognized.

    They don't make us feel happier or richer. Why are they not designed as well as the products we love to use such as an Apple iPod or a BMW? The 'developed' world has moved beyond the industrial mindset of products and the majority of 'products' that we encounter are actually parts of a larger service network. These services comprise people, technology, places, time and objects that form the entire service experience. In most cases some of the touchpoints are designed, but in many situations the service as a complete ecology just "happens" and is not consciously designed at all, which is why they don't feel like iPods or BMWs. One of the goals of service design is to redress this imbalance and to design services that have the same appeal and experience as the products we love, whether it is buying insurance, going on holiday, filling in a tax return, or having a heart transplant. Another important aspect of service design is its potential for design innovation and intervention in the big issues facing us, such as transport, sustainability, government, finance, communications and healthcare. Given that we live in a service and information age, a practical, thoughtful book about how to design better services is urgently needed.

    But creating an environment for creative thinking and innovation can be a daunting challenge. How can you make it happen at your company? The answer may surprise you: gamestorming.This book includes more than 80 games to help you break down barriers, communicate better, and generate new ideas, insights, and strategies. The authors have identified tools and techniques from some of the world's most innovative professionals, whose teams collaborate and make great things happen. This book is the result: a unique collection of games that encourage engagement and creativity while bringing more structure and clarity to the workplace. Find out why -- and how -- with Gamestorming.Overcome conflict and increase engagement with team-oriented gamesImprove collaboration and communication in cross-disciplinary teams with visual-thinking techniquesImprove understanding by role-playing customer and user experiencesGenerate better ideas and more of them, faster than ever beforeShorten meetings and make them more productiveSimulate and explore complex systems, interactions, and dynamicsIdentify a problem's root cause, and find the paths that point toward a solution

     Universal Methods of Design serves as an invaluable compendium of methods that can be easily referenced and used by cross-disciplinary teams in nearly any design project.   Methods and techniques are organized alphabetically for ongoing, quick reference. Each method is presented in a two-page format. The left-hand page contains a concise description of the method, accompanied by references for further reading. On the right-hand page, images and cases studies for each method are presented visually. The relevant phases for design application are highlighted as numbered icons along the right side of the page, from phases 1 (planning) through 5 (launch and monitor).Build more meaningful products with these methods and more: A/B Testing, Affinity Diagramming, Behavioral Mapping, Bodystorming, Contextual Design, Critical Incident Technique, Directed Storytelling, Flexible Modeling, Image Boards, Graffiti Walls, Heuristic Evaluation, Parallel Prototyping, Simulation Exercises, Touchstone Tours, and Weighted Matrix.  This essential guide:Dismantles the myth that user research methods are complicated, expensive, and time-consumingCreates a shared meaning for cross-disciplinary design teamsIllustrates methods with compelling visualizations and case studiesCharacterizes each method at a glanceIndicates when methods are best employed to help prioritize appropriate design research strategiesUniversal Methods of Design is an essential resource for designers of all levels and specializations.

    Designers of digital technology products no longer regard their job as designing a physical object--beautiful or utilitarian--but as designing our interactions with it. In Designing Interactions, award-winning designer Bill Moggridge introduces us to forty influential designers who have shaped our interaction with technology. Moggridge, designer of the first laptop computer (the GRiD Compass, 1981) and a founder of the design firm IDEO, tells us these stories from an industry insider's viewpoint, tracing the evolution of ideas from inspiration to outcome. The innovators he interviews--including Will Wright, creator of The Sims, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, and Doug Engelbart, Bill Atkinson, and others involved in the invention and development of the mouse and the desktop--have been instrumental in making a difference in the design of interactions. Their stories chart the history of entrepreneurial design development for technology.Moggridge and his interviewees discuss such questions as why a personal computer has a window in a desktop, what made Palm's handheld organizers so successful, what turns a game into a hobby, why Google is the search engine of choice, and why 30 million people in Japan choose the i-mode service for their cell phones. And Moggridge tells the story of his own design process and explains the focus on people and prototypes that has been successful at IDEO--how the needs and desires of people can inspire innovative designs and how prototyping methods are evolving for the design of digital technology.Designing Interactions is illustrated with more than 700 images, with color throughout. Accompanying the book is a DVD that contains segments from all the interviews intercut with examples of the interactions under discussion.Interviews with: Bill Atkinson - Durrell Bishop - Brendan Boyle - Dennis Boyle - Paul Bradley - Duane Bray - Sergey Brin - Stu Card - Gillian Crampton Smith - Chris Downs- Tony Dunne - John Ellenby - Doug Englebart - Jane Fulton Suri - Bill Gaver - Bing Gordon - Rob Haitani - Jeff Hawkins - Matt Hunter - Hiroshi Ishii - Bert Keely - David Kelley - Rikako Kojima - Brenda Laurel - David Liddle - Lavrans L?vlie - John Maeda - Paul Mercer - Tim Mott - Joy Mountford - Takeshi Natsuno - Larry Page - Mark Podlaseck - Fiona Raby - Cordell Ratzlaff - Ben Reason - Jun Rekimoto - Steve Rogers - Fran Samalionis - Larry Tesler - Bill Verplank - Terry Winograd - Will Wright

    Updated to include two extended final chapters with in-depth prescriptions for building a career in advertising, this edition also features a real-world look at the day-to-day operations of today's ad agencies. Among the most disparaged campaigns in advertising history, the Mr. Whipple ads for Charmin toilet paper were also wildly successful. Sullivan explores the Whipple phenomenon, examining why bad ads sometimes work, why great ads sometimes fail, and how advertisers can learn to balance creative work with the mandate to sell products.

    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.

    With this practical, hands-on book, you’ll learn how to do it faster and smarter using Lean UX techniques. UX expert Laura Klein shows you what it takes to gather valuable input from customers, build something they’ll truly love, and reduce the time it takes to get your product to market.No prior experience in UX or design is necessary to get started. If you’re an entrepreneur or an innovator, this book puts you right to work with proven tips and tools for researching, identifying, and designing an intuitive, easy-to-use product.Determine whether people will buy your product before you build itListen to your customers throughout the product’s lifecycleUnderstand why you should design a test before you design a productGet nine tools that are critical to designing your productDiscern the difference between necessary features and nice-to-havesLearn how a Minimum Viable Product affects your UX decisionsUse A/B testing in conjunction with good UX practicesSpeed up your product development process without sacrificing quality

    My princesses I never knew I had. And the woman I thought I lost forever.How did I ever let her go?Now that Lia is back in my arms, my bed, my heart...There's no way I'll lose her again.All I want is to put my family first.But will a sheikh's call of duty destroy it all?And will my baby daughters accept me as their father?Note: Sheikh's Lost Triplet Baby Girls is a steamy second chance romance between a Sheikh and the mother of his secret babies.

    Five are connected to a series of old unsolved disappearances. But the sixth is fresh. What’s worse, two of the victims—including the most recent—were killed with Cork’s gun. As Cork searches for answers, he must dig into his own past and that of his father, a well-respected man who harbored a ghastly truth. Northwest Angle: Amid the wreckage of a violent storm, Cork O’Connor and his daughter Jenny discover a body. Nearby, a baby boy lies hungry and dehydrated but still very much alive. Powerful forces in pursuit of the child follow them to the isolated Northwest Angle, where it’s impossible to tell who is friend or foe. Trickster’s Point: Cork O’Connor sits deep in the wilderness with his good friend Jubal Little—favored to become Minnesota’s first Native American elected governor—who is slowly dying with an arrow through his heart. But this is no hunting accident. The arrow is one of Cork’s. As he works to clear his name and track the killer who set him up, only Cork knows that his complex, passionate, ambitious friend was also capable of murder.

    

    Falling in love with him while saving the world is . . . complicated.An eighteen-year-old covert agent is pulled out of training before graduation by Black X, a espionage group so secret even the President of the United States doesn't know it exists.For her first mission, she must go undercover as the long-lost daughter of a recently deceased billionaire, infiltrate high society, and protect the Prince of Montrovia from assassination.But Prince Lorenzo is known as the Playboy Prince for a reason and his sensuality and charisma add a whole other level of complication to her mission.She knows that her every move is being watched, but what she doesn't know is that the Prince is just a chess piece in a bigger game that will have world-wide ramifications. And that Blackwood Academy, the place she has called home for the past six years has secrets of its own.