In Super Bowl XLIX, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll made on…

Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don…

Rethink the Way You Think In hindsight, every great idea seems obvious. But how can you be the person who comes up with those ideas? In this revised and expanded edition of his groundbreaking Thinkertoys, creativity expert Michael Michalko reveals life-changing tools that will help you think like a genius. From the linear to the intuitive, this comprehensive handbook details ingenious creative-thinking techniques for approaching problems in unconventional ways. Through fun and thought-provoking exercises, you’ll learn how to create original ideas that will improve your personal life and your business life. Michalko’s techniques show you how to look at the same information as everyone else and see something different. With hundreds of hints, tricks, tips, tales, and puzzles, Thinkertoys will open your mind to a world of innovative solutions to everyday and not-so-everyday problems.

Thinkertoys

"Playing with Color "is a highly accessible, fun approa…

Playing with Color: 50 Graphic Experiments for Explorin…

There are a lot of books out there that show collection…

Logo Design Love: A Guide to Creating Iconic Brand Iden…

Bruce Goldstein's COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY connects the stu…

Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Eve…

User experience (UX) strategy lies at the intersection of UX design and business strategy, but until now, there hasn't been an easy-to-apply framework for executing it. This hands-on guide introduces lightweight product strategy tools and techniques to help you and your team devise innovative digital solutions that people want. Author Jaime Levy shows UX/UI designers, product managers, entrepreneurs, and aspiring strategists simple to advanced methods that can be applied right away. You'll gain valuable perspective through business cases and historical context. This second edition includes new real-world examples, updated techniques, and a chapter on conducting qualitative online user research. Define value propositions and validate target users through provisional personas and customer discovery techniques Explore marketplace opportunities by conducting competitive research and analysis Design experiments using rapid prototypes that are focused on the business model Conduct online user research to gain valuable insights quickly on any budget Test business ideas and validate marketing channels by running online advertising and landing page campaigns

UX Strategy

User Experience Management: Essential Skills for Leading Effective UX Teams deals with specific issues associated with managing diverse user experience (UX) skills, often in corporations with a largely engineering culture. Part memoir and part handbook, it explains what it means to lead a UX team and examines the management issues of hiring, inheriting, terminating, layoffs, interviewing and candidacy, and downsizing. The book offers guidance on building and creating a UX team, as well as equipping and focusing the team. It also considers ways of nurturing the team, from coaching and performance reviews to conflict management and creating work-life balance. Furthermore, it discusses the essential skills needed in leading an effective team and developing a communication plan. This book will be valuable to new managers and leaders, more experienced managers, and anyone who is leading or managing UX groups or who is interested in assuming a leadership role in the future. - Gives a UX leadership boot-camp from putting together a winning team, to giving them a driving focus, to acting as their spokesman, to handling difficult situations - Full of practical advice and experiences for managers and leaders in virtually any area of the user experience field - Contains best practices, real-world stories, and insights from UX leaders at IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and many more!

User Experience Management

Information architecture (IA) is far more challenging—and necessary—than ever. With the glut of information available today, anything your organization wants to share should be easy to find, navigate, and understand. But the experience you provide has to be familiar and coherent across multiple interaction channels, from the Web to smartphones, smartwatches, and beyond. To guide you through this broad ecosystem, this popular guide—now in its fourth edition—provides essential concepts, methods, and techniques for digital design that have withstood the test of time. UX designers, product managers, developers, and anyone involved in digital design will learn how to create semantic structures that will help people engage with your message. This book includes: An overview of IA and the problems it solves for creating effective digital products and services A deep dive into IA components, including organization, labeling, navigation, search, and metadata Processes and methods that take you from research to strategy, design, and IA implementation

Information Architecture

Why we don't really want simplicity, and how we can learn to live with complexity. If only today's technology were simpler! It's the universal lament, but it's wrong. In this provocative and informative book, Don Norman writes that the complexity of our technology must mirror the complexity and richness of our lives. It's not complexity that's the problem, it's bad design. Bad design complicates things unnecessarily and confuses us. Good design can tame complexity. Norman gives us a crash course in the virtues of complexity. Designers have to produce things that tame complexity. But we too have to do our part: we have to take the time to learn the structure and practice the skills. This is how we mastered reading and writing, driving a car, and playing sports, and this is how we can master our complex tools. Complexity is good. Simplicity is misleading. The good life is complex, rich, and rewarding—but only if it is understandable, sensible, and meaningful.

Living with Complexity

Both Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google as seasoned Silicon Valley business executives, but over the course of a decade they came to see the wisdom in Coach John Wooden's observation that 'it's what you learn after you know it all that counts'. As they helped grow Google from a young start-up to a global icon, they relearned everything they knew about management. How Google Works is the sum of those experiences distilled into a fun, easy-to-read primer on corporate culture, strategy, talent, decision-making, communication, innovation, and dealing with disruption. The authors explain how the confluence of three seismic changes - the internet, mobile, and cloud computing - has shifted the balance of power from companies to consumers. The companies that will thrive in this ever-changing landscape will be the ones that create superior products and attract a new breed of multifaceted employees whom the authors dub 'smart creatives'. The management maxims ('Consensus requires dissension', 'Exile knaves but fight for divas', 'Think 10X, not 10%') are illustrated with previously unreported anecdotes from Google's corporate history. 'Back in 2010, Eric and I created an internal class for Google managers,' says Rosenberg. 'The class slides all read 'Google confidential' until an employee suggested we uphold the spirit of openness and share them with the world. This book codifies the recipe for our secret sauce: how Google innovates and how it empowers employees to succeed.'

How Google Works

Exquisitely produced to reflect Dieter Rams’ aesthetic …

Dieter Rams: Ten Principles for Good Design

Graphic Design which fulfills aesthetic needs, complies…

Paul Rand: A Designer's Art

IDEO founder and Stanford d.school creator David Kelley and his brother Tom Kelley, IDEO partner and the author of the bestselling The Art of Innovation, have written a powerful and compelling book on unleashing the creativity that lies within each and every one of us. Too often, companies and individuals assume that creativity and innovation are the domain of the "creative types." But two of the leading experts in innovation, design, and creativity on the planet show us that each and every one of us is creative. In an incredibly entertaining and inspiring narrative that draws on countless stories from their work at IDEO, the Stanford d.school, and with many of the world's top companies, David and Tom Kelley identify the principles and strategies that will allow us to tap into our creative potential in our work lives, and in our personal lives, and allow us to innovate in terms of how we approach and solve problems. It is a book that will help each of us be more productive and successful in our lives and in our careers.

Creative Confidence

Why attractive things work better and other crucial insights into human-centered design Emotions are inseparable from how we humans think, choose, and act. In Emotional Design, cognitive scientist Don Norman shows how the principles of human psychology apply to the invention and design of new technologies and products. In The Design of Everyday Things, Norman made the definitive case for human-centered design, showing that good design demanded that the user's must take precedence over a designer's aesthetic if anything, from light switches to airplanes, was going to work as the user needed. In this book, he takes his thinking several steps farther, showing that successful design must incorporate not just what users need, but must address our minds by attending to our visceral reactions, to our behavioral choices, and to the stories we want the things in our lives to tell others about ourselves. Good human-centered design isn't just about making effective tools that are straightforward to use; it's about making affective tools that mesh well with our emotions and help us express our identities and support our social lives. From roller coasters to robots, sports cars to smart phones, attractive things work better. Whether designer or consumer, user or inventor, this book is the definitive guide to making Norman's insights work for you.

Emotional Design

Talking to people about your designs might seem like a basic skill, but it can be difficult to do efficiently and well. And, in many cases, how you communicate about your work with stakeholders, clients, and other non-designers is more critical than the designs themselves—simply because the most articulate person usually wins. This practical guide focuses on principles, tactics, and actionable methods for presenting your designs. Whether you design UX, websites, or products, you’ll learn how to win over anyone who has influence over the project—with the goal of creating the best experience for the end user. Walk through the process of preparing for and presenting your designs Understand stakeholder perspectives, and learn how to empathize with them Cultivate both implicit and explicit listening skills Learn tactics and formulas for expressing the most effective response to feedback Discover why the way you follow through is just as crucial as the meeting itself Educate your stakeholders by sharing the chapter from this book on how to work with designers

Articulating Design Decisions

Emphasizes the essential role of information systems in…

Information Systems: Foundation of E-Business (4th Edit…

Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious—even liberating—book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization. The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time. In this entertaining and insightful analysis, cognitive scientist Don Norman hails excellence of design as the most important key to regaining the competitive edge in influencing consumer behavior. Now fully expanded and updated, with a new introduction by the author, The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how—and why—some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.

Farshad Sadri

Product & UX Design Leader | Founder @DashSquid & @IdeateSchool | Educator, Speaker & Mentor