At under 200 pages it's quick reading too. Makes a great airplane book.

    Sam Ladner fills the gap by advancing rigorous ethnographic practice that is tailored to corporate settings where colleagues are not steeped in social theory, research time lines may be days rather than months or years, and research sponsors expect actionable outcomes and recommendations. Ladner provides step-by-step guidance at every turn--covering core methods, research design, using the latest mobile and digital technologies, project and client management, ethics, reporting, and translating your findings into business strategies. This book is the perfect resource for private-sector researchers, designers, and managers seeking robust ethnographic tools or academic researchers hoping to conduct research in corporate settings. More information on the book is available at http://www.practicalethnography.com/.

    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.

    Some can generate coherent user experiences, others produce confusing patchwork designs. Some inspire teams to contribute to them, while others are neglected. Some get better with time, more cohesive and better functioning; others get worse, becoming bloated and cumbersome.Throughout this book, Alla Kholmatova, previously a lead designer at FutureLearn, will share an approach and the key qualities of effective, enduring design systems. It’s based on Alla’s experiences, case-studies from AirBnB, Atlassian, Eurostar, TED, and Sipgate, plus 18 months of research and interviews — all attempting to figure out what works and what doesn’t work in real-life products. It may not answer every question, but it will help you figure out just the right strategy for establishing and evolving a design system in your organization.

    But what’s in it for you? And if you’re not a content strategist, why should you care?Because even if content strategy isn’t your job, content’s probably your problem-and probably more than you think. You or your business has a message you want to deliver, right? You can deliver that message through various channels and content types, from Tweets to testimonials and photo galleries galore, and your audience has just as many ways of engaging with it. So many ways, so much content… so where’s the problem? That is the problem. And you can measure it in time, creativity, money, lost opportunity, and the sobs you hear equally from creative directors, project managers, and search engine marketing specialists.The solution is content strategy, and this book offers real-world examples and approaches you can adopt, no matter your role on the team. Put content strategy to work for you by gathering this book into your little hands and gobbling up never-before seen case studies from teams at Johns Hopkins Medicine, MINI, Icebreaker, and more. Content Strategy at Work is a book for designers, information architects, copywriters, project managers, and anyone who works with visual or verbal content. It discusses how you can communicate and forge a plan that will enable you, your company, or your client get that message across and foster better user experiences.

    Good site defense can make or break the customer experience. This book shows the right (and wrong) ways to get defensive, offers guidelines to prevent errors and rescue customers if a breakdown occurs.It also shows you how to evaluate and improve your own site's defensive design.

    This is a practical, hands-on guide for anyone trying to design systems that reflect the way customers want to do their work. The authors developed Contextual Design, the method discussed here, through their work with teams struggling to design products and internal systems. In this book, you'll find the underlying principles of the method and how to apply them to different problems, constraints, and organizational situations.Contextual Design enables you to+ gather detailed data about how people work and use systems + develop a coherent picture of a whole customer population + generate systems designs from a knowledge of customer work+ diagram a set of existing systems, showing their relationships, inconsistencies, redundancies, and omissions

    The goal of the book is to share the techniques of the best companies. This book is aimed primarily at Product Managers working on technology-powered products. That includes the hundreds of "tech companies" like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and the like, as well as the thousands of companies moving to leverage technology (financial companies, media companies, retailers, manufacturers, nearly every industry). Inspired covers companies from early stage start-ups to large, established companies. The products might be consumer products or devices, business services for small businesses to enterprises, internal tools, and developer platforms.Inspired is secondarily aimed at the designers, engineers, user researchers and data scientists that work closely with the product managers on product teams at these same companies.

    This is the missing book about agile that shows how designers, product managers, and development teams can integrate experience design into lean and agile product development. It equips you with tools, techniques and a framework for designing great experiences using agile methods so you can deliver timely products that are technically feasible, profitable for the business, and desirable from an end-customer perspective. This book will help you successfully integrate your design process on an agile project and feel like part of the agile team. do good design faster by doing just enough, just in time. use design methods from disciplines such as design thinking, customer-centered design, product design, and service design. create successful digital products by considering the needs of the end-customer, the business, and technology. understand the next wave of thinking about continuous design and continuous delivery.

    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.

    Learn how to design beautiful user interfaces by yourself using specific tactics explained from a developer's point-of-view.

    It shows you how to use the Value Proposition Canvas, a practical business tool to design, test, create, and manage products and services customers want. It compliments and perfectly integrates with the Business Model Canvasfrom "Business Model Generation" so you can succeed with great value propositions embedded in scalable and profitable business models.Practical exercises, process illustrations, and workshop suggestions help you immediately apply the tools in the book to your daily work. The book includes an online access to Strategyzer.com to complete and assess exercises interactively, learn from peers, and download pdfs, checklists, and more.You'll love "Value Proposition Design" if you've been overwhelmed by the task of true customer value creation, frustrated by unproductive product meetings and misaligned teams, involved in bold shiny projects that blew up, or simply disappointed by the failure of a good idea."Value Proposition Design" will help you successfully understand the patterns of value creation, leverage the experience and skills of your team, avoid wasting time with ideas that won't work, and guide you through the design and test of products and services that customers want.

    Designing sites that foster user interaction and community-building is a valuable skill for web developers and designers today, but it's not that easy to understand the nuances of the social web. Now you have help. Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone share hard-won insights into what works, what doesn't, and why. You'll learn how to balance opposing factions and grow healthy online communities by co-creating them with your users.Understand the overarching principles you need to consider for every website you createLearn basic design patterns for adding social components to an existing siteRein in misbehaving users on an active community siteBuild a social experience around a product or service and invite people to joinDevelop a social utility without having to build an entirely new infrastructureEnable users of your site's content to interact with one anotherOffer your members the opportunity to connect in the real worldLearn to recognize and avoid antipatterns: emergent bad practices in the social network and social media space

    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.

    But there's often mystery around product research, with the feeling that you need to be a research Zen master to gather anything useful. Fact is, anyone can conduct product research. With this quick reference guide, you'll learn a common language and set of tools to help you carry out research in an informed and productive manner.This book contains four sections, including a brief introduction to UX research, planning and preparation, facilitating research, and analysis and reporting. Each chapter includes a short exercise so you can quickly apply what you've learned.Learn what it takes to ask good research questionsKnow when to use quantitative and qualitative research methodsExplore the logistics and details of coordinating a research sessionUse softer skills to make research seem natural to participantsLearn tools and approaches to uncover meaning in your raw dataCommunicate your findings with a framework and structure