User-Centered Design Stories


Book Description

User-Centered Design Stories is the first user-centered design casebook with cases covering the key tasks and issues facing UCD practitioners today. Intended for both students and practitioners, this book follows the Harvard Case study method, where the reader is placed in the role of the decision-maker in a real-life professional situation. In this book, the reader is asked to analyze dozens of UCD work situations and propose solutions for the problem set. The problems posed in the cases cover a wide variety of key tasks and issues faced by practitioners, including those related to organizational/managerial topics, UCD methods and processes, and technical/ project issues. The benefit of the casebook and its organization is that it offers new practitioners (as well as experienced practitioners working in new settings) valuable practice in decision-making that cannot be obtained by simply reading a book or attending a seminar. - The first User-Centered Design Casebook, with cases covering the key tasks and issues facing UCD practitioners today. - Each chapter based on real world cases with complex problems, giving readers as close to a real-world experience as possible. - Offers "the things you don't learn in school," such as innovative and hybrid solutions that were actually used on the problems discussed.




User-Centered Design


Book Description

Looks at the application design process, describing how to create user-friendly applications.




Interactive Design


Book Description

User experience design is one of the fastest-growing specialties in graphic design. Smart companies realize that the most successful products are designed to meet the needs and goals of real people—the users. This means putting the user at the center of the design process. This innovative, comprehensive book examines the user-centered design process from the perspective of a designer. With rich imagery, Interactive Design introduces the different UX players, outlines the user-centered design process from user research to user testing, and explains through various examples how user-centered design has been successfully integrated into the design process of a variety of design studios worldwide.




User Experience Innovation


Book Description

User Experience Innovation is a book about creating novel and engaging user experiences for new products and systems. User experience is what makes devices such as Apple's iPhone and systems such as Amazon.com so successful. iPhone customers don't buy just a phone; they buy into an experience enabled by the device. Similarly, Amazon.com customers enter a world of book reviews, interesting recommendations, instant downloads to their Kindle, and one-click purchasing. Products today are focal points, and it is the experience surrounding the product that matters the most. User Experience Innovation helps you create the right sort of experience around your products in order to be successful in the marketplace. The approach in User Experience Innovation is backed by 18 years of experience from an author holding more than 100 patents relating to user experience. This is a book written by a practitioner for other practitioners. You'll learn 17 specific methods for creating innovation; these methods run the gamut from targeting user needs to relieving pain points, to providing positive surprises, to innovating around paradoxes. Each method is one that the author has used successfully. Taken together, they can help you create truly successful user experience innovations to benefit your company or organization, and to help you grow as an experienced expert and innovator in your own right. Provides 17 proven methods for innovating around user experience Helps you think beyond the product to the sum total of a customer's experience Written by an experienced practitioner holding more than 100 user-experience patents




User-centered Design


Book Description

User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach will help you optimize your customers' total experience with any technology product or service - from purchase and installation through support, upgrades, and beyond. Karel Vredenburg, Scott Isensee, and Carol Righi, the field's leading experts, present methods, techniques, case studies, and CD-ROM-based tools for introducing, deploying, and optimizing UCD to make products that are simpler, more elegant, more powerful, and more profitable.




Design Justice


Book Description

An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival. What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? “Design justice” is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims expilcitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world. This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)—and invites readers to “build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.” Along the way, the book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and employment diversity in the technology and design professions; it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival.




Design Is How It Works


Book Description

"It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."-Steve Jobs There's a new race in business to embrace "design thinking." Yet most executives have no clue what to make of the recent buzz about design. It's rarely the subject of business retreats. It's not easily measurable. To many, design is simply a crapshoot. Drawing on interviews with top executives such as Virgin's Richard Branson and Nike's Mark Parker, Jay Greene illuminates the methods of companies that rely on design to stand out in their industries. From the experiences of those at companies from Porsche to REI to Lego, we learn that design isn't merely about style and form. The heart of design is rethinking the way products and services work for customers in real life. Greene explains how: -Porsche pit its designers against each other to create its bestselling Cayenne SUV -Clif listened intently to customers, resulting in the industry-changing Luna energy bar -OXO paid meticulous attention to the details, turned its LiquiSeal mug from an abysmal failure into one of its greatest successes -LEGO started saying no to its designers-saving its brick business in the process Greene shows how important it is to build a culture in which design is more than an after-the-fact concern-it's part of your company's DNA. Design matters at every stage of the process. It isn't easy, and it increases costs, but it also boosts profits, sometimes to a massive extent. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, design represents the best chance you have of transcending your competitors.




Designing for the Digital Age


Book Description

Whether you’re designing consumer electronics, medical devices, enterprise Web apps, or new ways to check out at the supermarket, today’s digitally-enabled products and services provide both great opportunities to deliver compelling user experiences and great risks of driving your customers crazy with complicated, confusing technology. 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 User Experience Team of One


Book Description

The User Experience Team of One prescribes a range of approaches that have big impact and take less time and fewer resources than the standard lineup of UX deliverables. 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.




Personas - User Focused Design


Book Description

People relate to other people, not to simplified types or segments. This is the concept that underpins this book. Personas, a user centered design methodology, covers topics from interaction design within IT, through to issues surrounding product design, communication, and marketing. Project developers need to understand how users approach their products from the product’s infancy, and regardless of what the product might be. Developers should be able to describe the user of the product via vivid depictions, as if they – with their different attitudes, desires and habits – were already using the product. In doing so they can more clearly formulate how to turn the product's potential into reality. Based on 20 years’ experience in solving problems for businesses and 15 years of research, currently at the IT University of Copenhagen, Lene Nielsen is Denmark’s leading expert in the persona method. She has a PhD in personas and scenarios, and through her research and practical experiences has developed her own approach to the method – 10 Steps to Personas. This second edition of Personas – User Focused Design presents a step-by-step methodology of personas which will be of interest to developers of IT, communications solutions and innovative products. This book also includes three new chapters and considerable expansion on the material in the first edition.