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.




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.




A Project Guide to UX Design


Book Description

User experience design is the discipline of creating a useful and usable Web site or application that’s easily navigated and meets the needs of the site owner and its users. There’s a lot more to successful UX design than knowing the latest Web technologies or design trends: It takes diplomacy, management skills, and business savvy. That’s where the updated edition of this important book comes in. With new information on design principles, mobile and gestural interactions, content strategy, remote research tools and more, you’ll learn to: Recognize the various roles in UX design, identify stakeholders, and enlist their support Obtain consensus from your team on project objectives Understand approaches such as Waterfall, Agile, and Lean UX Define the scope of your project and avoid mission creep Conduct user research in person or remotely, and document your findings Understand and communicate user behavior with personas Design and prototype your application or site Plan for development, product rollout, and ongoing quality assurance




Think Like a UX Researcher


Book Description

Think Like a UX Researcher will challenge your preconceptions about user experience (UX) research and encourage you to think beyond the obvious. You’ll discover how to plan and conduct UX research, analyze data, persuade teams to take action on the results and build a career in UX. The book will help you take a more strategic view of product design so you can focus on optimizing the user’s experience. UX Researchers, Designers, Project Managers, Scrum Masters, Business Analysts and Marketing Managers will find tools, inspiration and ideas to rejuvenate their thinking, inspire their team and improve their craft. Key Features A dive-in-anywhere book that offers practical advice and topical examples. Thought triggers, exercises and scenarios to test your knowledge of UX research. Workshop ideas to build a development team’s UX maturity. War stories from seasoned researchers to show you how UX research methods can be tailored to your own organization.




Don't Make Me Think, Revisited


Book Description

Since Don't Make Me Think was first published in 2000, hundreds of thousands of Web designers and developers have relied on usability guru Steve Krug's guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design. Witty, commonsensical, and eminently practical, it's one of the best-loved and most recommended books on the subject. Now Steve returns with fresh perspective to reexamine the principles that made Don't Make Me Think a classic-with updated examples and a new chapter on mobile usability. And it's still short, profusely illustrated...and best of all-fun to read. If you've read it before, you'll rediscover what made Don't Make Me Think so essential to Web designers and developers around the world. If you've never read it, you'll see why so many people have said it should be required reading for anyone working on Web sites. "After reading it over a couple of hours and putting its ideas to work for the past five years, I can say it has done more to improve my abilities as a Web designer than any other book." -Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing with Web Standards




Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design


Book Description

In a complex world, products that are easy to use win favor with consumers. This is the first book on the topic of simplicity aimed specifically at interaction designers. It shows how to drill down and simplify user experiences when designing digital tools and applications. It begins by explaining why simplicity is attractive, explores the laws of simplicity, and presents proven strategies for achieving simplicity. Remove, hide, organize and displace become guidelines for designers, who learn simplicity by seeing before and after examples and case studies where the results speak for themselves.




The UX Careers Handbook


Book Description

This second edition of The UX Careers Handbook offers you all the great advice of the first edition—freshly updated—plus a new chapter on critical soft skills, much more on becoming a UX leader, and a 17th user experience (UX) career pathway. The UX Careers Handbook, Second Edition, offers you an insider's advice on learning, personal branding, networking skills, building your resume and portfolio, and actually landing that UX job you want, as well as an in-depth look at what it takes to get into and succeed in a UX career. Whether your interests include design, information architecture, strategy, research, UX writing, or any of the other core UX skillsets, you'll find a wealth of resources in this book. The book also includes: Insights and personal stories from a range of industry-leading UX professionals to show you how they broke into the industry and evolved their own careers over time Activities and worksheets to help you make good decisions and build your career Along with the book, you can explore its companion website with more resources and information to help you stay on top of this fast-changing field. Not only for job seekers, The UX Careers Handbook, Second Edition, is a must-have for Employers and recruiters who want to better understand how to hire and keep UX staff Undergraduate and graduate students thinking about their future careers Professionals in other careers who are thinking about starting to do UX work Cory Lebson has been a UX consultant and user researcher for over two decades. He is Principal and Owner of a small UX research consultancy, a builder of UX community, and a past president of the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA). Not only a practitioner of UX, Cory teaches and mentors to help professionals grow their UX skills and conducts regular talks and workshops on topics related to both UX skills and career development.




100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People


Book Description

We design to elicit responses from people. We want them to buy something, read more, or take action of some kind. Designing without understanding what makes people act the way they do is like exploring a new city without a map: results will be haphazard, confusing, and inefficient. This book combines real science and research with practical examples to deliver a guide every designer needs. With it you’ll be able to design more intuitive and engaging work for print, websites, applications, and products that matches the way people think, work, and play. Learn to increase the effectiveness, conversion rates, and usability of your own design projects by finding the answers to questions such as: What grabs and holds attention on a page or screen? What makes memories stick? What is more important, peripheral or central vision? How can you predict the types of errors that people will make? What is the limit to someone’s social circle? How do you motivate people to continue on to (the next step? What line length for text is best? Are some fonts better than others? These are just a few of the questions that the book answers in its deep-dive exploration of what makes people tick.




Laws of UX


Book Description

An understanding of psychology—specifically the psychology behind how users behave and interact with digital interfaces—is perhaps the single most valuable nondesign skill a designer can have. The most elegant design can fail if it forces users to conform to the design rather than working within the "blueprint" of how humans perceive and process the world around them. This practical guide explains how you can apply key principles in psychology to build products and experiences that are more intuitive and human-centered. Author Jon Yablonski deconstructs familiar apps and experiences to provide clear examples of how UX designers can build experiences that adapt to how users perceive and process digital interfaces. You’ll learn: How aesthetically pleasing design creates positive responses The principles from psychology most useful for designers How these psychology principles relate to UX heuristics Predictive models including Fitts’s law, Jakob’s law, and Hick’s law Ethical implications of using psychology in design A framework for applying these principles




UX Design Process


Book Description

UX design isn’t a new field. But sometimes new approaches lead to new perspectives. In this book, you’ll learn how lean UX has made the whole discipline more approachable and attractive to startups, and you’ll see that UX issues aren’t just a quick fix, but should also address big-picture issues. Sometimes, the solution to a problem is just to fix a broken UX. At other times, you need to constantly fine-tune in order to keep up with changing demands. You’ll also explore wireframing techniques, research planning and design bias. TABLE OF CONTENTS - Interaction Design In The Cloud - Lean Startup Is Great UX Packaging - Fitting Big-Picture UX Into Agile Development - You Already Know How To Use It - Fixing A Broken User Experience - Beyond Wireframing: The Real-Life UX Design Process - Stop Redesigning And Start Tuning Your Site Instead - Designer Myopia: How To Stop Designing For Ourselves - The UX Research Plan That Stakeholders Love