Rosenfeld Media

When artificial intelligence is designed poorly, it diminishes people’s skills rather than enhancing them. It can even make users less capable and more dependent on AI. In Designing Assistant Technology, Christopher Noessel provides a framework for how to use AI to assist users, as well as mitigating the risks of de-skilling and overreliance on AI.

Who Should Read This Book

This book was written with four audiences in mind:

• Product owners and technology strategists who want to ensure that the software they offer is doing everything it can for users and their organizations.
• Interaction designers, user experience professionals, educators, and students who will build and inform the direct experiences with these systems.
• Futurists and tech sector pundits who might want to understand that AI is only as dark as they let it become.
• Everyone else because part of the responsibility of being a citizen is building literacy in the major forces at play, what biases those forces have, and what needs to be done to combat negative effects.

Takeaways

• Understand the conceptual difference between an agent and an assistant.
• Better understand your business’s challenges and how AI can help.
• Incorporate the book’s framework into an existing design process.
• De-risk how assistants are introduced to a workflow.
• Learn design patterns to mitigate the risks of assistants.
• Rely on AI assistants just enough, but not too much.

When artificial intelligence is designed poorly, it diminishes people’s skills rather than enhancing them. It can even make users less capable and more dependent on AI. In Designing Assistant Technology, Christopher Noessel provides a framework for how to use AI to assist users, as well as mitigating the risks of de-skilling and overreliance on AI.

Who Should Read This Book

This book was written with four audiences in mind:

• Product owners and technology strategists who want to ensure that the software they offer is doing everything it can for users and their organizations.
• Interaction designers, user experience professionals, educators, and students who will build and inform the direct experiences with these systems.
• Futurists and tech sector pundits who might want to understand that AI is only as dark as they let it become.
• Everyone else because part of the responsibility of being a citizen is building literacy in the major forces at play, what biases those forces have, and what needs to be done to combat negative effects.

Takeaways

• Understand the conceptual difference between an agent and an assistant.
• Better understand your business’s challenges and how AI can help.
• Incorporate the book’s framework into an existing design process.
• De-risk how assistants are introduced to a workflow.
• Learn design patterns to mitigate the risks of assistants.
• Rely on AI assistants just enough, but not too much.

Staff design is a combination of team leadership and in-the-pixels design work, all without managing direct reports. This handbook will guide you to success—whether you’re already navigating a staff design role, or you’re deciding if you should embark on the journey. You’ll learn to build influence with soft power, improve your communication, and impact strategy at scale.

Who Should Read This Book

This book was written for UX practitioners who are considering the staff design role, including:

• Senior designers who want to get promoted to the staff level by identifying and filling their competency gap.
• UX practitioners who want to learn about the role before choosing between hands-on and management paths. 

It’s also incredibly helpful for staff designers in need of new tactics to shift from reactive to proactive, build influence, and become the leader they want to be.

Takeaways

• Learn what the difference is between a staff designer and a senior designer.
• Compare the duties of a staff designer in a small, medium, and large company settings.
• Make time for visioning and planning projects while you set healthy boundaries.
• Create and drive a product vision.
• Know how to build influence without authority. 
• Scale your impact and prove your value as a staff designer.

Staff design is a combination of team leadership and in-the-pixels design work, all without managing direct reports. This handbook will guide you to success—whether you’re already navigating a staff design role, or you’re deciding if you should embark on the journey. You’ll learn to build influence with soft power, improve your communication, and impact strategy at scale.

Who Should Read This Book

This book was written for UX practitioners who are considering the staff design role, including:

• Senior designers who want to get promoted to the staff level by identifying and filling their competency gap.
• UX practitioners who want to learn about the role before choosing between hands-on and management paths. 

It’s also incredibly helpful for staff designers in need of new tactics to shift from reactive to proactive, build influence, and become the leader they want to be.

Takeaways

• Learn what the difference is between a staff designer and a senior designer.
• Compare the duties of a staff designer in a small, medium, and large company settings.
• Make time for visioning and planning projects while you set healthy boundaries.
• Create and drive a product vision.
• Know how to build influence without authority. 
• Scale your impact and prove your value as a staff designer.

Why do crucial customer insights often fail to drive product decisions? The answer: wasted research. Jake Burghardt identifies the insidious root causes of research waste, giving actionable ideas to increase the impact of siloed research. You’ll learn to enhance collaboration, maximize learning, and drive research-informed product launches. Anyone—from UX researchers and insight generators to data scientists and CX analysts—will benefit from these crucial customer insights.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is for anyone who’s seen too many important customer insights that failed to drive next steps in their business. It’s for leaders and practitioners who want to experiment with new ways to increase their organization’s research use in product development and delivery. Specifically, it’s perfect for researchers from any discipline from UX to CX to sales to data science. It’s also a must-read for leaders of product, design, marketing, and engineering —anyone who wants to improve decision-making based on available customer research. And that includes operations people.

Takeaways

 
• Uncover tools and methods to reduce research waste.
 
• Learn how to find and use hidden research that might have lasting impact on your organization.
 
• Discover knowledge-consolidating tools and requirements for repositories.
 
• Increase the impact of any type of customer research on your organization.
 
• Note the special “IDEA” sections that show possible actions to choose based on what makes sense for your current resources and organizational context
 
• See “You Might Be Asking” sidebars, which give answers to common questions.
 
• Search for “Imagine a Way Forward” sidebars that highlight special scenarios—telling a story of action ideas as step-by-step narratives.
 
• Look for insightful interviews from experts in the field.
 
• Read the chapter summaries of key proposals to get more value from research, including a distillation of what success might look like.

Conventional product development focuses on the solution. Empathy is a mindset that focuses on people, helping you to understand their thinking patterns and perspectives. Practical Empathy will show you how to gather and compare these patterns to make better decisions, improve your strategy, and collaborate successfully.

Welcome to the future, where you can talk with the digital things around you: voice assistants, chatbots, and more. 

But these interactions can be unhelpful and frustrating—sometimes even offensive or biased. Conversations with Things teaches you how to design conversations that are useful, ethical, and human–centered—because everyone deserves to be understood, especially you.

Any organization that has a searchable web site or intranet is sitting on top of hugely valuable and usually under-exploited data: logs that capture what users are searching for, how often each query was searched, and how many results each query retrieved. Search queries are gold: they are real data that show us exactly what users are searching for in their own words. This book shows you how to use search analytics to carry on a conversation with your customers: listen to and understand their needs, and improve your content, navigation and search performance to meet those needs.

Interviewing is a foundational user research tool that people assume they already possess. Everyone can ask questions, right? Unfortunately, that's not the case. Interviewing Users provides invaluable interviewing techniques and tools that enable you to conduct informative interviews with anyone. You'll move from simply gathering data to uncovering powerful insights about people.

Content strategy is clearly critical to your organization, but where do you start, and how do you grow it into a true practice? Whether you're a lone content person tasked with creating a content strategy practice from scratch, or a leader struggling to scale one up, From Solo to Scaled is your blueprint for creating and managing a content strategy practice that is sustainable and successful.

Who Should Read This Book?

Takeaways

• Create a content strategy practice blueprint and make the business case for it to upper management in your organization.
• Show what success looks like and how to measure it.
• Learn how to create a sustainable practice and when to scale it—from solo to mid–sized to enterprise.
• Take an inventory of your existing tools to see if you need to repurpose or augment them as you prepare to scale your business.
• Learn how to present the content practice’s work to leadership in language that leaders understand.
• Use a handy checklist to audit and improve your own practice–building.

Design makes a tremendous impact on the produced world in terms of usability, resources, understanding, and priorities. What we produce, how we serve customers and other stakeholders, and even how we understand how the world works is all affected by the design of models and solutions. Designers have an unprecedented opportunity to use their skills to make meaningful, sustainable change in the world—if they know how to focus their skills, time, and agendas. In Design is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable, Nathan Shedroff examines how the endemic culture of design often creates unsustainable solutions, and shows how designers can bake sustainability into their design processes in order to produce more sustainable solutions.

It’s easier than ever to build a new product. But developing a great product that people actually want to buy and use is another story. 

Build Better Products is a hands-on, step-by-step guide that helps teams incorporate strategy, empathy, design, and analytics into their development process. You’ll learn to develop products and features that improve your business’s bottom line while dramatically improving customer experience.

Are your designs protecting—or exposing—your users? In Design for Privacy, you’ll uncover how shifting technologies threaten personal data and what that means for your work. This book offers practical guidelines and proven strategies to create experiences that respect and protect people’s privacy, while helping you foster a culture of “privacy by design” in your organization and practice.

Who Should Read This Book

All designers—UX, interface, or product—are waking up to the importance of privacy. But if you’re a strategist, a developer, a producer, or a product manager, online privacy is your job, too. Design for Privacy dissects and explains the ever-changing field of designing for privacy in depth.

Takeaways

In the fluid world of online privacy, this book explains how to address:

• Critical privacy issues, such as cyberstalking and bullying
• How to handle your role as a designer of privacy issues
• Why your business should care about your customers’ privacy
• What it means to handle data responsibly
• How to use careful language with regard to privacy
• Which privacy tools work
• How to create a privacy-by-design scenario in your business
• How AI is impacting online privacy
• How legal, ethical, and moral issues affect privacy
• How to comply with federal and international laws of privacy
• What your rights are where privacy is concerned

After years of building the same interface elements, some designers and developers get wise and try to create reusable, common solutions to help everyone stop reinventing the wheel every time. Most fail. In Design That Scales, design systems expert Dan Mall draws on his extensive experience helping some of the world's most recognizable brands create design practices that are truly sustainable and successful.

Who Should Read This Book?

Takeaways

• A design system is crucial for any organization managing two or more digital products. Learn how to create, manage, and sustain a successful design system.
• See how the ecosystem of a design system works in order to understand the context for success.
• Figure out where the people involved in a design system fit and how they can best collaborate.
• Learn the metrics for success within a design system and how to measure them.
• Determine the best techniques for marketing your design system to stakeholders.
• Learn what guidance and relationships are crucial for a design system to succeed.
• See the end-of-chapter questions that highlight how to guide your design system to a profitable outcome.

Every interaction the customer has around your brand contributes to the story of their experience. This book provides actionable advice to tell a powerful story your customers will love. —Katie Dill, Vice President of Design, Lyft

Customer experiences are increasingly complicated—with multiple channels, touchpoints, contexts, and moving parts—all delivered by fragmented organizations. How can you bring your ideas to life in the face of such complexity? Orchestrating Experiences is a practical guide for designers and everyone struggling to create products and services in complex environments.

Liftoff! is your guide to leveling up as a design manager and leader. 

Its experience–driven approach—written by designers for designers—will help you hire and scale teams, develop careers, learn why diversity matters to your business, and solidify design's role in your organization. Liftoff! will elevate your skills to lead your team and company to new heights.

User research war stories are personal accounts of the challenges researchers encounter out in the field, where mishaps are inevitable, yet incredibly instructive. Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries is a diverse compilation of war stories that range from comically bizarre to astonishingly tragic, tied together with valuable lessons from expert user researcher Steve Portigal.

Effective interface animation deftly combines form and function to improve feedback, aid in orientation, direct attention, show causality, and express your brand’s personality. Designing Interface Animation shows you how to create web animation that balances purpose and style while blending seamlessly into the user’s experience. This book is a crash course in motion design theory and practice for web designers, UX professionals, and front-end developers alike.

Want to know what your users are thinking? If you’re a product manager or developer, this book will help you learn the techniques for finding the answers to your most burning questions about your customers. With step-by-step guidance, Validating Product Ideas shows you how to tackle the research to build the best possible product.

Just as pilots and doctors improve by studying crash reports and postmortems, experience designers can improve by learning how customer experience failures cause products to fail in the marketplace. Rather than proselytizing a particular approach to design, Why We Fail holistically explores what teams actually built, why the products failed, and how we can learn from the past to avoid failure ourselves.

Interviewing is easy, right? Anyone can do it… but few do it well enough to unlock the benefits and insights that interviewing users and customers can yield.

In this new and updated edition of the acclaimed classic Interviewing Users, Steve Portigal quickly and effectively dispels the myth that interviewing is trivial. He shows how research studies and logistics can be used to determine concrete goals for a business and takes the reader on a detailed journey into the specifics of interviewing techniques, best practices, fieldwork, documentation, and how to make sense of uncovered data. Then Steve takes the process even further―showing the methods and details behind asking questions―from the words themselves to the interviewer’s actions and how they influence an interview. There is even a chapter on making sure that information gleaned from the research study is used by the business in such a way to make it impactful and worthwhile. Oh, and for good measure he throws in information about Research Operations.

But, hey, that’s just the nuts and bolts of the book. The truly fun part is Steve’s voice and how he portrays this information through amusing anecdotes about his career, fascinating examples from other practitioners, and tips and tricks that only the most experienced UX researchers, like Steve, could come up with. As a nod to the pandemic, he offers ideas for the best way to interview someone remotely, and he also discusses personal bias―how to identify and deal with it so that it doesn’t affect interviews.

Everyone will get something from this book. But beyond the requisite information, it’s simply a good read. And if you want another good read with stories galore, pick up Steve’s other book Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries.

"Quite simply the best book on when, why, and how you should conduct user interview studies."
—Elizabeth F. Churchill, PhD, Senior Director, Google

Who Should Read This Book?

• Anyone and everyone who is interested in finding out what makes their business tick, i.e., who their users are.
• Anyone and everyone who wants to learn how to interview and listen to people.
• Anyone and everyone, including CEOs, user researchers, designers, engineers, marketers, product managers, strategists, interviewers, and you.

Takeaways

• User research is key for companies to include in their design and development process.
• The best way to do user research is through interviewing users and determining their needs.
• Interviewing can identify what could be designed or what is actually a problem.
• Teams who meet their users face-to-face will build better products.
• Field research takes a lot of preparation to be successful―and a solid plan in advance.
• There are critical techniques and frameworks for mapping human behavior.
• A good interviewer always puts their participants at ease.
• If you ask the right questions, you’ll get the right answers.
• A smart interviewer checks their worldview at the door.
• To establish a rapport with your interviewee, listen and don’t be judgmental.
• Research data is a combination of analysis and synthesis.
• The importance of research analysis must be continually highlighted and emphasized to the powers that be.

We all tell stories. It's one of the most natural ways to share information, as old as the human race. This book is not about a new technique, but how to use something we already know in a new way. Stories help us gather and communicate user research, put a human face on analytic data, communicate design ideas, encourage collaboration and innovation, and create a sense of shared history and purpose. This book looks across the full spectrum of user experience design to discover when and how to use stories to improve our products. Whether you are a researcher, designer, analyst or manager, you will find ideas and techniques you can put to use in your practice.

Good content isn’t magical—it's thoughtful, creative, and well researched words put together with finesse. In Strategic Content Design, you'll learn how to create effective content, using hard–won research methods, best practices, and proven tips for conducting quantitative and qualitative content–focused research and testing.

"This is me, shouting from the rooftops: Strategic Content Design belongs in the hands of absolutely anyone who cares about content in UX—by which I mean EVERYONE."
—Kristina Halvorson, CEO and Founder, Brain Traffic

Who Should Read This Book?

Takeaways

• Realistically assess the current state of your content.
• Learn how to write content research questions.
• Create a content research study and evaluate your content&apos:s effectiveness.
• Identify which specific words or content elements to test. Analyze your research results.
• Identify which specific words or content elements to test.
• Determine which research methods and tools are ideal for your team's content research needs.
• Elevate the role of content design in your company, proving that content is key to creating an outstanding customer experience—and improving your bottom line.
• Create a content research roadmap.
• Learn from professional content people in case studies that highlight practical examples.

Few organizations realize a return on their digital investment. They’re distracted by political infighting and technology-first solutions. To reach the next level, organizations must realign their assets—people, content, and technology—by practicing the discipline of digital governance. Managing Chaos inspires new and necessary conversations about digital governance and its transformative power to support creativity, real collaboration, digital quality, and online growth.

"This isn't yet another seemingly-endless-series-of-checklists books to help you tick off all the elements that cumulatively add up to accessibility. Instead, it's a book about how to improve the way you do user experience design, so it inevitably produces things that are accessible." — Steve Krug, Author of Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

If you are in charge of the user experience, development, or strategy for a web site, A Web for Everyone will help you make your site accessible without sacrificing design or innovation. Rooted in universal design principles, this book provides solutions: practical advice and examples of how to create sites that everyone can use.

Emotion. Ego. Impatience. Stubbornness. Characteristics like these make creating sites and apps for kids a daunting proposition. However, with a bit of knowledge, you can design experiences that help children think, play, and learn. With Design for Kids, you'll learn how to create digital products for today's connected generation.

Your customer has five senses and a small universe of devices. Why aren't you designing for all of them? Go beyond screens, keyboards, and touchscreens by letting your customer's humanity drive the experience—not a specific device or input type. Learn the techniques you'll need to build fluid, adaptive experiences for multiple inputs, multiple outputs, and multiple devices.

Mobile user experience is a new frontier. Untethered from a keyboard and mouse, this rich design space is lush with opportunity to invent new and more human ways for people to interact with information. Invention requires casting off many anchors and conventions inherited from the last 50 years of computer science and traditional design and jumping head first into a new and unfamiliar design space.

Card sorting helps us understand how people think about content and categories. Armed with this knowledge, we can group information so that people can better find and understand it. In this book, Donna describes how to plan and run a card sort, then analyse the results and apply the outcomes to your project.

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.

Care about content? Better copy isn't enough. As devices and channels multiply—and as users expect to relate, share, and shift information quickly—we need content that can go more places, more easily. Content Everywhere will help you stop creating fixed, single-purpose content and start making it more future-ready, flexible, reusable, manageable, and meaningful wherever it needs to go.

Remote studies allow you to recruit subjects quickly, cheaply, and immediately, and give you the opportunity to observe users as they behave naturally in their own environment. In Remote Research, Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte teach you how to design and conduct remote research studies, top to bottom, with little more than a phone and a laptop.

Like a good story, successful design is a series of engaging moments structured over time. The User’s Journey will show you how, when, and why to use narrative structure, technique, and principles to ideate, craft, and test a cohesive vision for an engaging outcome. See how a “story first” approach can transform your product, feature, landing page, flow, campaign, content, or product strategy.

Many designers enjoy the interfaces seen in science fiction films and television shows. Freed from the rigorous constraints of designing for real users, sci-fi production designers develop blue-sky interfaces that are inspiring, humorous, and even instructive. By carefully studying these “outsider” user interfaces, designers can derive lessons that make their real-world designs more cutting edge and successful.

Game design is a sibling discipline to software and Web design, but they're siblings that grew up in different houses. They have much more in common than their perceived distinction typically suggests, and user experience practitioners can realize enormous benefit by exploiting the solutions that games have found to the real problems of design. This book will show you how.

Most organizations fail to tap into the game–changing power of research. Research That Scales is the ultimate playbook for transforming your research practice, whatever its size or shape, into an impactful and efficient insight–generating engine. Use it to plan, manage, and scale a research practice that can truly propel businesses forward.

Who Should Read This Book?

If you’re a research leader, a researcher, or a ResearchOps specialist, this book is a must–read. But if you work in product management, design, content, marketing, academia, or for an agency, and do research as part of your work, this book is for you, too. Anyone involved in devising strategies and systems that support scaled–up human–centered research will find Research That Scales invaluable.

Takeaways

• Learn what it means to scale research and how to build purpose into your research practice.
• Gain a pragmatic view of research strategy and why it's crucial to scaling research.
• Design a research operating system that can grow the impact of research.
• Uncover the eight elements of research operations and the ResearchOps Venn diagram.
• Use the ResearchOps Planning Matrix to deliver operations that make good ideas real.
• Build systems that make finding the right research participants a breeze.
• Learn how to make the most of research by developing a research knowledge management (RKM) strategy.
• Build a foundation of trust with your company and stakeholders by shifting perceptions about research.
• Make ethics and data privacy more than a checklist of dos and don'ts and lofty principles.
• Learn how to become a "money magnet" for research.
• Attract and retain the best research talent to fuel your growth.

If you're an executive, designer, product manager, marketer, or engineer, communication is part of your work. Using images and text in unique ways, comics can engage readers in ways traditional methods can't. In See What I Mean, you'll learn how to create comics about your products and processes without an illustrator—just like Google, eBay, and Adobe do.

Behavior change design creates entrancing—and effective—products and experiences. 

Whether you've studied psychology or are new to the field, you can incorporate behavior change principles into your designs to help people achieve meaningful goals, learn and grow, and connect with one another. Engaged offers practical tips for design professionals to apply the psychology of engagement to their work.

Prototyping is a great way to communicate the intent of a design both clearly and effectively. Prototypes help you to flesh out design ideas, test assumptions, and gather real-time feedback from users. With this book, Todd Zaki Warfel shows how prototypes are more than just a design tool by demonstrating how they can help you market a product, gain internal buy-in, and test feasibility with your development team.

Whether you're new to UX or a seasoned practitioner, The User Experience Team of One gives you everything you need to succeed, emphasizing down–to–earth approaches that deliver big impact over time–consuming, needlessly complex techniques. This updated classic remains a comprehensive and essential guide for UX and product designers everywhere—you'll accomplish a lot more with a lot less.

Who Should Read This Book?

The techniques and advice in this book are applicable to anyone who is just starting out in user experience, as well as seasoned practitioners who have been in the field for years. In addition, anyone who read the first edition will appreciate this updated edition that features loads of new material that has changed over the past 10 years. There are tips, tools, and techniques throughout the book to improve your performance. The various methods detail exactly how to handle a variety of situations—from the timing involved, the materials, when to use that information, and how to try it out. Look for real–life sidebars from the authors, as well as experts in the field. This book applies to a team of one or a team of many.

Takeaways

• The first section covers the philosophy of the UX team of one—why you do it, how you build support, how to identify common challenges, and how to keep growing.
• The second section of the book, "Practice," gives you tools and techniques for managing this balancing act with detailed methods.
• The 25 up–to–date methods in Part II prompt a question about a specific topic, answer the question, give the average time it will take to deal with the issue, tell you when to use this material, and give you instructions for "Trying It Out".
• You can learn about working conditions that a team of one often experiences.
• The book addresses difficult situations that UX practitioners often encounter (for example, the need for speed in corporate environments.
• Be sure to review the UX Value Loop[TM] that Joe created to define UX.
• Check out sidebars that highlight some of Joe and Leah's personal real–life experiences.
• The end of each chapter tells you what to do if you can "only do one thing"
• Finally, notes and tips give you handy techniques and tools to use in your own practice.

In our interconnected world, we face a complex cybersecurity ecosystem where digital vulnerabilities can have far-reaching consequences. Threats to digital infrastructure often impact critical physical systems, potentially causing real-world harm. With AI agents set to handle extensive personal information, data security and privacy are more crucial than ever.

Human-Centered Security targets professionals designing digital products that handle sensitive data: UX designers, engineers, and product managers. It's also for those responsible for securing organizational data and systems: security engineers, CISOs, CIOs, and teams focused on risk management, legal, privacy, and compliance.

These professionals influence security-related behaviors and possess deep knowledge of threats to their products or organizations. This places a significant responsibility on them to design resilient systems that encourage safer outcomes. As the stakes continue to rise in our digital landscape, their role in protecting users from evolving cybersecurity risks becomes increasingly vital.

• Focus on areas of the user experience where security impacts users the most. These are places where users are signing up, configuring a product for the first time, handling customer or patient data, or when confronted with a security or privacy-related message or warning, to name a few.
• Understand the dynamics of the security ecosystem. Looking at the security ecosystem from a single vantage point won’t work. Instead, you need to understand how the system design impacts users, how user actions prompt changes to the system design, how threat actors take advantage, how threat actors actions prompt changes to the system design, how users react, and on and on.
• Find your security UX allies. Think of a Venn diagram, with circles representing the security team, the UX team, the product team, the engineering team, the legal and privacy teams, as so on. To improve the security user experience, these circles must overlap. In other words, each group’s expertise and perspective are required to understand and design for the dynamic cybersecurity ecosystem.
• Ask better questions when talking to your cross-disciplinary team. These questions will help your team anticipate how users might react and how threat actors might take advantage.
• What to consider when designing for secure outcomes. The book examines some of the most common security user experience issues.
• Embrace iteration. Users will do things you didn't expect or account for. Even more importantly, threat actors will act in ways you couldn't have predicted. What was effective yesterday might not be as effective today.

Drawing from psychology, neuroscience, and years of real-world experience, We Need to Talk provides a practical framework for navigating difficult conversations with confidence and empathy. Whether you're dealing with workplace conflicts, team dynamics, or challenging personal discussions, this book equips you with the tools to transform confrontational situations into opportunities for growth and understanding. No scripts, no shortcuts—just proven strategies that work.

Who Should Read This Book

If you work with other humans, this book is for you. Whether you're a leader trying to build psychological safety on your team, an individual contributor navigating tricky workplace dynamics, or someone who wants to get better at having hard conversations, you'll find practical tools here. While the examples come primarily from technology and creative fields, the framework works across industries and various roles. You'll learn how to transform potentially confrontational situations into opportunities for growth and understanding, all while staying true to your authentic communication style. This isn't about becoming a conflict expert—it's about you feeling confident and capable when those inevitable tough conversations arise.

Takeaways

• Learn the core principles underlying difficult conversations. 
• Delve into how your brain processes conflict. 
• Study a multitude of techniques for maintaining psychological safety. 
• Learn to apply practical solutions to solving real-world problems.  
• Practice handling difficult conversations in your own authentic way. 
• Figure out specific techniques for staying centered, asking the right questions, and keeping your cool when caught off guard. 
• Learn how to navigate the tricky waters of conflict when you don’t agree with your boss. 
• Study de-escalation techniques for a tense situation in order to guide conversations back to productive territory.  
• Say no and mean it!

Eye tracking is a widely used research method, but there are many questions and misconceptions about how to effectively apply it. Eye Tracking the User Experience—the first how-to book about eye tracking for UX practitioners—offers step-by-step advice on how to plan, prepare, and conduct eye tracking studies; how to analyze and interpret eye movement data; and how to successfully communicate eye tracking findings.

Over the past decade, service designers have played an essential role in creating comprehensive, customer-focused products and services. This updated edition of an industry classic highlights the practice’s evolution and broadened impact in the business world. You’ll benefit from new frameworks, tools, and methods, and learn from fresh case studies that demonstrate the value of service design across service ecosystems.

Who Should Read This Book

If you’re involved in business, this second edition of Service Design will help you gain knowledge about how best to serve your customers. The following people would find it especially beneficial:

• Service designers
• User experience designers, graphic designers, or any type of designer
• Product and project managers
• Leaders of organizations
• Marketing people
• Customer service representatives

Takeaways

If you’re new to service design, this book will help you:

• Uncover the true meaning of service design.
• Learn how services differ from products.
• Prototype different service experiences.
• Measure services and journeys.
• Make the case for return on investment to an organization with service design.
• Deploy service design in a business.
• Show how to design with people, not for them.
• Understand how to work across time and multiple touchpoints.

There is no single methodology for creating the perfect product—but you can increase your odds. 

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.

Some of today’s most popular video games have been on the market for decades, while others barely make it days before disappearing forever. What differentiates the games that survive? This expansive look at modern video game development gives you an end-to-end, cross-disciplinary understanding of the people, processes, and core design principles you’ll need to create video games that thrive. 

Who Should Read This Book

This book is for anyone and everyone interested in working on and creating games, including:

• Aspiring game developers of any discipline.
• Veteran game developers looking to reframe their understanding of game development to account for modern trends and standards.
• Creative leaders who need to build and support environments where great video games are created.
• Game designers trying to improve their understanding of the business considerations that have felled so many recent games.
• User experience designers looking to understand, define, and expand their impact in the broader video game market.
• Producers struggling with the choice of business model or monetization choices for their games.
• Partners to video game developers like legal counsel, business development, venture capitalists, marketing, licensing, and human relations.

You’ll learn…

• A standard for basic game design principles.
• Foundational science and the art of universal player motivation, critical to informing decisions about the game.
• The modern gaming business, including live-service games.
• The roles that people and companies play in the game development process.
• A common language for game development techniques.
• How to achieve creative ideation and learn prioritization techniques.
• More advanced design topics to help games thrive over time.
• How to design games that encourage positive social experiences.
• Modern video gaming monetization techniques.
• To recognize common ethical and legal issues.
• About key video games hardware, software, engines, and platforms.
• What works and what doesn’t in gaming—showing common patterns in the industry and design struggles.
• Insights that will apply to teams and games of any size—from indie games to mega games

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Does “game development” in the title mean this is a programming book? No. This book is intended for anyone who works on video games, and starts in Chapter 1, “What Makes Us Play,” by exploring universal player motivations. The word developer in video gaming, like the broader software industry, is used in many different ways. As discussed in Chapter 3, “Putting the Dev in Game Development,”while some folks believe “game development” refers only to programming, it is usually a more general term applied to the collective act of making a game across all disciplines (as demonstrated by the existence of the broader Game Developers Conference).
2. Is this book only useful for new game developers? This book is useful for game developers at any stage of their career. While it’s a fantastic overview for early career game developers, many veterans who reviewed this book mentioned that they pulled away new insights, especially from chapters like Chapter 9, “From Emergence to Prosocial Gaming.” and Chapter 11, “Efficient and Ethi-cal Economies.” Readers will walk away with a common language for game development techniques from chapters like Chapter 3 and Chapter 13, “The Good and Bad of Game Dev Processes,” that you can use with developers at any career stage.
3. Can I use this book to help my nonindustry partners understand game development? Absolutely! As I wrote this book, I wrote it with a secondary audience of partners like business development, legal, and other groups who don’t experience the industry in the same way. There are tons of folks who would benefit from an overview of the industry and our considerations all in one place. They’ll get the most out of chapters like Chapter 2, “The Living Business of Games,” and Chapter 10, “The Money Game,” which lay out the basic business models at play today, as well as Chapter 3, which will help folks understand why game development teams are so big and complex, and Chapter 7, “Engaging Players over Time,” and Chapter 8,“Creating Immersive Worlds,” which really help explain how games are different from other forms of entertainment.

User experience designers and researchers are wrestling with product management—as a peer discipline, a job title, a future career—or simply wondering exactly what it entails. In Product Management for UX People, Christian

“Katie Swindler does a brilliant job of breaking down our stress response, with vivid stories that demonstrate how the systems we create can help or hinder at critical times.”— Carolyn Chandler, coauthor, A Project Guide to UX Design and Adventures in Experience Design

Emergencies—landing a malfunctioning plane, resuscitating a heart attack victim, or avoiding a head-on car crash—all require split-second decisions that can mean life or death. Fortunately, designers of life-saving products have leveraged research and brain science to help users reduce panic and harness their best instincts.

Life and Death Design brings these techniques to everyday designers who want to help their users think clearly and act safely. 

Forms make or break the most crucial online interactions: checkout (commerce), registration (community), data input (participation and sharing), and any task requiring information entry. In Web Form Design, Luke Wroblewski draws on original research, his considerable experience at Yahoo! and eBay, and the perspectives of many of the field's leading designers to show you everything you need to know about designing effective and engaging Web forms.

Just as pilots and doctors improve by studying crash reports and postmortems, experience designers can improve by learning how customer experience failures cause products to fail in the marketplace. Rather than proselytizing a particular approach to design, Why We Fail holistically explores what teams actually built, why the products failed, and how we can learn from the past to avoid failure ourselves.

"An easy-to-read introduction to service design, with great examples from one of the world's leading service design agencies. A 'must read' for anyone who wants to become familiar with service design in theory, methods, and practice!" —Prof. Birgit Mager, President, Service Design Network gGmbH

Service Design is an eminently practical guide to designing services that work for people. It offers powerful insights, methods, and case studies to help you design, implement, and measure multichannel service experiences with greater impact for customers, businesses, and society.

Without words, apps would be an unusable jumble of shapes and icons, while voice interfaces and chatbots wouldn't even exist. Words make software human–centered, and require just as much thought as the branding and code. This book will show you how to give your users clarity, test your words, and collaborate with your team. You'll see that writing is designing.

As design continues to impact our products, services, and solutions at scale, it is more important than ever to understand the systems and context that surround design decisions. Closing the Loop will introduce you to a powerful systems thinking mindset and provide you with the tools and frameworks to define the systems that surround your work.

"Cababa's book comes at a crucial moment for design, and points the way toward a more inclusive, meaningful future for our work."
—David Dylan Thomas, author, Design for Cognitive Bias

Who Should Read This Book?

Takeaways

• Combine user–centered design with systems thinking to understand interconnections and interventions to create goals that benefit society.
• Expand their thinking about what constitutes problem–solving in order to reframe problem spaces.
• Map the status quo in order to better envision the future.
• Kick off primary research by conducting interviews with subject matter experts.
• Use stakeholder maps as a form of analysis and synthesis output.
• Create a causal loop map to articulate systems forces in the form of cause and effect.
• Develop a theory of change to plan initiatives that will lead to the desired outcomes and impact.
• Use the futures wheel as a tool to imagine the impact of decisions.

Your favorite apps and programs share one thing in common: they are all thoughtfully designed. Design Operations is the business practice that ensures great design and great designers thrive and deliver meaningful impact. The Design Conductors is your comprehensive guide to DesignOps. You’ll learn how to successfully advocate for, build out, scale up, and ultimately operate design organizations.

Who Should Read This Book?

Although The Design Conductors is definitely for designers, it's also an essential field guide for product and project managers of all types. Anyone who works in the intersection of process and change management, such as healthcare, tech, or financial services, can learn the design methodologies used by DesignOps practitioners. People who work hand–in–hand with designers, particularly those in the fields of software, hardware, or creative design, will also find this book useful. Finally, leaders in design, product, business, and engineering should read this book to learn how to create their own DesignOps culture where teams who build great user experiences can thrive.

Takeaways

• Learn what DesignOps is and where it began.
• Explore the most common backgrounds for people who want to become DesignOps practitioners.
• Define the eight career competencies that all DesignOps practitioners share.
• Learn the practical application of building, running, and growing a DesignOps team—one that is already in existence or one that is built from scratch.
• Highlight the different kinds of paths a DesignOps professional can take in their career—with real-world examples.
• Operationalize values by leading to effect transformative changes in teams and businesses.
• Show how the four most common DesignOps org models influence the ways in which teams can function and be organized.
• Use the book’s comprehensive toolkit for both hiring or interviewing for a DesignOps team.

Online learning can be so dull—or not!

Enter Jenae Cohn and Michael Greer, experienced authors and teachers, who decided it was time to take on the challenge of making online learning more interesting and compelling for students. So, they met in a Zoom call, contacted Rosenfeld Media, and wrote this book, Design for Learning: User Experience in Online Teaching and Learning (many Zoom calls later).

The book is structured to teach online learning in such a way that anyone can follow its practices and create a dynamic educational presentation. Chapters cover everything from learning about your learners and setting learning goals to building connections with learners and giving them feedback. In addition, the authors dive into the nitty-gritty details of creating online courses, including takeaways at the end of each chapter and easy-to-follow examples throughout.

“I particularly appreciate how thoughtful Jenae and Michael are about considering the experience from the learner’s point of view and the emphasis they put on learner agency.”
—Julie Dirksen, Author, Design for How People Learn

Together, Jenae Cohn and Michael Greer have years of experience designing and producing online courses for students. They wanted the tone of their book to be friendly, supportive, engaging, empathetic, and thoughtful. With that in mind, they chose examples that reflected what an ordinary user might encounter on a day-to-day basis, highlighting everything from complex skills (accessibility) to the most minute details, such as:

• Writing compelling content and instructional text
• Designing interesting text and visuals
• Planning and producing videos
• Recording sound and voice-overs
• Creating and facilitating live website presentations
• Designing surveys for class feedback
• Rating whether your presentation was successful

Who This Book Is For

• Teachers, learning development professionals, and anyone tasked with designing an online course or a one-off workshop
• Content creators, instructional designers, user experience designers, and others who care about the experience of online learning

Best of all—your course will never be called dull again.

Emotion. Ego. Impatience. Stubbornness. Characteristics like these make creating sites and apps for kids a daunting proposition. However, with a bit of knowledge, you can design experiences that help children think, play, and learn. With Design for Kids, you'll learn how to create digital products for today's connected generation.

Surveys That Work explains a seven–step process for designing, running, and reporting on a survey that gets accurate results. In a no–nonsense style with plenty of examples about real–world compromises, the book focuses on reducing the errors that make up Total Survey Error—a key concept in survey methodology. If you are conducting a survey, this book is a must–have.

Online learning can be so dull—or not!

Enter Jenae Cohn and Michael Greer, experienced authors and teachers, who decided it was time to take on the challenge of making online learning more interesting and compelling for students. So, they met in a Zoom call, contacted Rosenfeld Media, and wrote this book, Design for Learning: User Experience in Online Teaching and Learning (many Zoom calls later).

The book is structured to teach online learning in such a way that anyone can follow its practices and create a dynamic educational presentation. Chapters cover everything from learning about your learners and setting learning goals to building connections with learners and giving them feedback. In addition, the authors dive into the nitty-gritty details of creating online courses, including takeaways at the end of each chapter and easy-to-follow examples throughout.

“I particularly appreciate how thoughtful Jenae and Michael are about considering the experience from the learner’s point of view and the emphasis they put on learner agency.”
—Julie Dirksen, Author, Design for How People Learn

Together, Jenae Cohn and Michael Greer have years of experience designing and producing online courses for students. They wanted the tone of their book to be friendly, supportive, engaging, empathetic, and thoughtful. With that in mind, they chose examples that reflected what an ordinary user might encounter on a day-to-day basis, highlighting everything from complex skills (accessibility) to the most minute details, such as:

• Writing compelling content and instructional text
• Designing interesting text and visuals
• Planning and producing videos
• Recording sound and voice-overs
• Creating and facilitating live website presentations
• Designing surveys for class feedback
• Rating whether your presentation was successful

Who Is This Book For?

• Teachers, learning development professionals, and anyone tasked with designing an online course or a one-off workshop
• Content creators, instructional designers, user experience designers, and others who care about the experience of online learning

Best of all—your course will never be called dull again.

"Finally, digital teams have a reference book that covers everything they need to know about project management, from scoping and budgeting to managing teams and clients." —Karen McGrane, author, Going Responsive

Customer experiences are increasingly complicated—with multiple channels, touchpoints, contexts, and moving parts—all delivered by fragmented organizations. How can you bring your ideas to life in the face of such complexity? Orchestrating Experiences is a practical guide for designers and everyone struggling to create products and services in complex environments.

The world of healthcare is constantly evolving, ever increasing in complexity, costs, and stakeholders, and presenting huge challenges to policy making, decision making and system design. In Design for Care, we'll show how service and information designers can work with practice professionals and patients/advocates to make a positive difference in healthcare.

There is no single methodology for creating the perfect product—but you can increase your odds. 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.

Forms make or break the most crucial online interactions: checkout (commerce), registration (community), data input (participation and sharing), and any task requiring information entry. In Web Form Design, Luke Wroblewski draws on original research, his considerable experience at Yahoo! and eBay, and the perspectives of many of the field's leading designers to show you everything you need to know about designing effective and engaging Web forms.

Service Design is an eminently practical guide to designing services that work for people. It offers powerful insights, methods, and case studies to help you design, implement, and measure multichannel service experiences with greater impact for customers, businesses, and society.

Your customer has five senses and a small universe of devices. Why aren't you designing for all of them? Go beyond screens, keyboards, and touchscreens by letting your customer's humanity drive the experience—not a specific device or input type. Learn the techniques you'll need to build fluid, adaptive experiences for multiple inputs, multiple outputs, and multiple devices.

Surveys That Work explains a seven–step process for designing, running, and reporting on a survey that gets accurate results. In a no–nonsense style with plenty of examples about real–world compromises, the book focuses on reducing the errors that make up Total Survey Error—a key concept in survey methodology. If you are conducting a survey, this book is a must–have.

If you're an executive, designer, product manager, marketer, or engineer, communication is part of your work. Using images and text in unique ways, comics can engage readers in ways traditional methods can't. In See What I Mean, you'll learn how to create comics about your products and processes without an illustrator—just like Google, eBay, and Adobe do.

Whether you're new to UX or a seasoned practitioner, The User Experience Team of One gives you everything you need to succeed, emphasizing down–to–earth approaches that deliver big impact over time–consuming, needlessly complex techniques. This updated classic remains a comprehensive and essential guide for UX and product designers everywhere—you'll accomplish a lot more with a lot less.

Who Should Read This Book?

The techniques and advice in this book are applicable to anyone who is just starting out in user experience, as well as seasoned practitioners who have been in the field for years. In addition, anyone who read the first edition will appreciate this updated edition that features loads of new material that has changed over the past 10 years. There are tips, tools, and techniques throughout the book to improve your performance. The various methods detail exactly how to handle a variety of situations—from the timing involved, the materials, when to use that information, and how to try it out. Look for real–life sidebars from the authors, as well as experts in the field. This book applies to a team of one or a team of many.

Takeaways

• The first section covers the philosophy of the UX team of one—why you do it, how you build support, how to identify common challenges, and how to keep growing.
• The second section of the book, "Practice," gives you tools and techniques for managing this balancing act with detailed methods.
• The 25 up–to–date methods in Part II prompt a question about a specific topic, answer the question, give the average time it will take to deal with the issue, tell you when to use this material, and give you instructions for "Trying It Out".
• You can learn about working conditions that a team of one often experiences.
• The book addresses difficult situations that UX practitioners often encounter (for example, the need for speed in corporate environments.
• Be sure to review the UX Value Loop[TM] that Joe created to define UX.
• Check out sidebars that highlight some of Joe and Leah's personal real–life experiences.
• The end of each chapter tells you what to do if you can "only do one thing"
• Finally, notes and tips give you handy techniques and tools to use in your own practice.

Whether you’re a designer, researcher, product manager, or engineer, you need to be concerned about your product’s security experience and your organization’s overall security.

If you care about the people who use your products and want to keep them safe, Human-Centered Security is an essential resource to have at your fingertips. This book provides valuable insights and critical questions to help you ensure that your organization’s security experience is both strong and effective.

Takeaways

• Learn how security impacts the user experience—both positively and negatively.
• Understand key security concepts and terms.
• Learn about the intricate dynamics of the user security experience.
• Figure out who your security allies are in your company and how to use them for the best outcomes.
• Ask better questions when talking to your cross-disciplinary team about how to interpret security.
• Consider what the enhanced measures are when designing for secure outcomes.
• Embrace iteration when threat actors surprise your company with unpredictable actions.
• Discover how to get buy-in for security from your leadership.

The world of healthcare is constantly evolving, ever increasing in complexity, costs, and stakeholders, and presenting huge challenges to policy making, decision making and system design. In Design for Care, we'll show how service and information designers can work with practice professionals and patients/advocates to make a positive difference in healthcare.

Interviewing is easy, right? Anyone can do it… but few do it well enough to unlock the benefits and insights that interviewing users and customers can yield.

In this new and updated edition of the acclaimed classic Interviewing Users, Steve Portigal quickly and effectively dispels the myth that interviewing is trivial. He shows how research studies and logistics can be used to determine concrete goals for a business and takes the reader on a detailed journey into the specifics of interviewing techniques, best practices, fieldwork, documentation, and how to make sense of uncovered data. Then Steve takes the process even further―showing the methods and details behind asking questions―from the words themselves to the interviewer’s actions and how they influence an interview. There is even a chapter on making sure that information gleaned from the research study is used by the business in such a way to make it impactful and worthwhile. Oh, and for good measure he throws in information about Research Operations.

But, hey, that’s just the nuts and bolts of the book. The truly fun part is Steve’s voice and how he portrays this information through amusing anecdotes about his career, fascinating examples from other practitioners, and tips and tricks that only the most experienced UX researchers, like Steve, could come up with. As a nod to the pandemic, he offers ideas for the best way to interview someone remotely, and he also discusses personal bias―how to identify and deal with it so that it doesn’t affect interviews.

Everyone will get something from this book. But beyond the requisite information, it’s simply a good read. And if you want another good read with stories galore, pick up Steve’s other book Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries.

"Quite simply the best book on when, why, and how you should conduct user interview studies."
—Elizabeth F. Churchill, PhD, Senior Director, Google

Who Should Read This Book?

• Anyone and everyone who is interested in finding out what makes their business tick, i.e., who their users are.
• Anyone and everyone who wants to learn how to interview and listen to people.
• Anyone and everyone, including CEOs, user researchers, designers, engineers, marketers, product managers, strategists, interviewers, and you.

Takeaways

• User research is key for companies to include in their design and development process.
• The best way to do user research is through interviewing users and determining their needs.
• Interviewing can identify what could be designed or what is actually a problem.
• Teams who meet their users face-to-face will build better products.
• Field research takes a lot of preparation to be successful―and a solid plan in advance.
• There are critical techniques and frameworks for mapping human behavior.
• A good interviewer always puts their participants at ease.
• If you ask the right questions, you’ll get the right answers.
• A smart interviewer checks their worldview at the door.
• To establish a rapport with your interviewee, listen and don’t be judgmental.
• Research data is a combination of analysis and synthesis.
• The importance of research analysis must be continually highlighted and emphasized to the powers that be.

Card sorting helps us understand how people think about content and categories. Armed with this knowledge, we can group information so that people can better find and understand it. In this book, Donna describes how to plan and run a card sort, then analyse the results and apply the outcomes to your project.

Few organizations realize a return on their digital investment. They’re distracted by political infighting and technology-first solutions. To reach the next level, organizations must realign their assets—people, content, and technology—by practicing the discipline of digital governance. Managing Chaos inspires new and necessary conversations about digital governance and its transformative power to support creativity, real collaboration, digital quality, and online growth.

"This is the book to read if you're thinking of a career transition from UX to product." —Ellen Chisa, Founder in Residence, Boldstart Ventures

User experience designers and researchers are wrestling with product management—as a peer discipline, a job title, a future career—or simply wondering exactly what it entails. In Product Management for UX People, Christian Crumlish demystifies product management for UX practitioners who want to understand, partner with, and even become product managers.

It’s easier than ever to build a new product. But developing a great product that people actually want to buy and use is another story. Build Better Products is a hands-on, step-by-step guide that helps teams incorporate strategy, empathy, design, and analytics into their development process. You’ll learn to develop products and features that improve your business’s bottom line while dramatically improving customer experience.

Prototyping is a great way to communicate the intent of a design both clearly and effectively. Prototypes help you to flesh out design ideas, test assumptions, and gather real-time feedback from users. With this book, Todd Zaki Warfel shows how prototypes are more than just a design tool by demonstrating how they can help you market a product, gain internal buy-in, and test feasibility with your development team.

Any organization that has a searchable web site or intranet is sitting on top of hugely valuable and usually under-exploited data: logs that capture what users are searching for, how often each query was searched, and how many results each query retrieved. Search queries are gold: they are real data that show us exactly what users are searching for in their own words. This book shows you how to use search analytics to carry on a conversation with your customers: listen to and understand their needs, and improve your content, navigation and search performance to meet those needs.

Are your designs protecting—or exposing—your users? In Design for Privacy, you’ll uncover how shifting technologies threaten personal data and what that means for your work. This book offers practical guidelines and proven strategies to create experiences that respect and protect people’s privacy, while helping you foster a culture of “privacy by design” in your organization and practice.

Who Should Read This Book

All designers—UX, interface, or product—are waking up to the importance of privacy. But if you’re a strategist, a developer, a producer, or a product manager, online privacy is your job, too. Design for Privacy dissects and explains the ever-changing field of designing for privacy in depth.

Takeaways

In the fluid world of online privacy, this book explains how to address:

• Critical privacy issues, such as cyberstalking and bullying
• How to handle your role as a designer of privacy issues
• Why your business should care about your customers’ privacy
• What it means to handle data responsibly
• How to use careful language with regard to privacy
• Which privacy tools work
• How to create a privacy-by-design scenario in your business
• How AI is impacting online privacy
• How legal, ethical, and moral issues affect privacy
• How to comply with federal and international laws of privacy
• What your rights are where privacy is concerned

Game design is a sibling discipline to software and Web design, but they're siblings that grew up in different houses. They have much more in common than their perceived distinction typically suggests, and user experience practitioners can realize enormous benefit by exploiting the solutions that games have found to the real problems of design. This book will show you how.

Some of today’s most popular video games have been on the market for decades, while others barely make it days before disappearing forever. What differentiates the games that survive? This expansive look at modern video game development gives you an end-to-end, cross-disciplinary understanding of the people, processes, and core design principles you’ll need to create video games that thrive. 

Who Should Read This Book

This book is for anyone and everyone interested in working on and creating games, including:

• Aspiring game developers of any discipline.
• Veteran game developers looking to reframe their understanding of game development to account for modern trends and standards.
• Creative leaders who need to build and support environments where great video games are created.
• Game designers trying to improve their understanding of the business considerations that have felled so many recent games.
• User experience designers looking to understand, define, and expand their impact in the broader video game market.
• Producers struggling with the choice of business model or monetization choices for their games.
• Partners to video game developers like legal counsel, business development, venture capitalists, marketing, licensing, and human relations.

You’ll learn…

• A standard for basic game design principles.
• Foundational science and the art of universal player motivation, critical to informing decisions about the game.
• The modern gaming business, including live-service games.
• The roles that people and companies play in the game development process.
• A common language for game development techniques.
• How to achieve creative ideation and learn prioritization techniques.
• More advanced design topics to help games thrive over time.
• How to design games that encourage positive social experiences.
• Modern video gaming monetization techniques.
• To recognize common ethical and legal issues.
• About key video games hardware, software, engines, and platforms.
• What works and what doesn’t in gaming—showing common patterns in the industry and design struggles.
• Insights that will apply to teams and games of any size—from indie games to mega games

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Does “game development” in the title mean this is a programming book? No. This book is intended for anyone who works on video games, and starts in Chapter 1, “What Makes Us Play,” by exploring universal player motivations. The word developer in video gaming, like the broader software industry, is used in many different ways. As discussed in Chapter 3, “Putting the Dev in Game Development,”while some folks believe “game development” refers only to programming, it is usually a more general term applied to the collective act of making a game across all disciplines (as demonstrated by the existence of the broader Game Developers Conference).
2. Is this book only useful for new game developers? This book is useful for game developers at any stage of their career. While it’s a fantastic overview for early career game developers, many veterans who reviewed this book mentioned that they pulled away new insights, especially from chapters like Chapter 9, “From Emergence to Prosocial Gaming.” and Chapter 11, “Efficient and Ethi-cal Economies.” Readers will walk away with a common language for game development techniques from chapters like Chapter 3 and Chapter 13, “The Good and Bad of Game Dev Processes,” that you can use with developers at any career stage.
3. Can I use this book to help my nonindustry partners understand game development? Absolutely! As I wrote this book, I wrote it with a secondary audience of partners like business development, legal, and other groups who don’t experience the industry in the same way. There are tons of folks who would benefit from an overview of the industry and our considerations all in one place. They’ll get the most out of chapters like Chapter 2, “The Living Business of Games,” and Chapter 10, “The Money Game,” which lay out the basic business models at play today, as well as Chapter 3, which will help folks understand why game development teams are so big and complex, and Chapter 7, “Engaging Players over Time,” and Chapter 8,“Creating Immersive Worlds,” which really help explain how games are different from other forms of entertainment.

Content strategy is clearly critical to your organization, but where do you start, and how do you grow it into a true practice? Whether you're a lone content person tasked with creating a content strategy practice from scratch, or a leader struggling to scale one up, From Solo to Scaled is your blueprint for creating and managing a content strategy practice that is sustainable and successful.

Who Should Read This Book?

Takeaways

• Create a content strategy practice blueprint and make the business case for it to upper management in your organization.
• Show what success looks like and how to measure it.
• Learn how to create a sustainable practice and when to scale it—from solo to mid–sized to enterprise.
• Take an inventory of your existing tools to see if you need to repurpose or augment them as you prepare to scale your business.
• Learn how to present the content practice’s work to leadership in language that leaders understand.
• Use a handy checklist to audit and improve your own practice–building.

As design continues to impact our products, services, and solutions at scale, it is more important than ever to understand the systems and context that surround design decisions. Closing the Loop will introduce you to a powerful systems thinking mindset and provide you with the tools and frameworks to define the systems that surround your work.

"Cababa's book comes at a crucial moment for design, and points the way toward a more inclusive, meaningful future for our work."
—David Dylan Thomas, author, Design for Cognitive Bias

Who Should Read This Book?

Takeaways

• Combine user–centered design with systems thinking to understand interconnections and interventions to create goals that benefit society.
• Expand their thinking about what constitutes problem–solving in order to reframe problem spaces.
• Map the status quo in order to better envision the future.
• Kick off primary research by conducting interviews with subject matter experts.
• Use stakeholder maps as a form of analysis and synthesis output.
• Create a causal loop map to articulate systems forces in the form of cause and effect.
• Develop a theory of change to plan initiatives that will lead to the desired outcomes and impact.
• Use the futures wheel as a tool to imagine the impact of decisions.

Over the past decade, service designers have played an essential role in creating comprehensive, customer-focused products and services. This updated edition of an industry classic highlights the practice’s evolution and broadened impact in the business world. You’ll benefit from new frameworks, tools, and methods, and learn from fresh case studies that demonstrate the value of service design across service ecosystems.

Who Should Read This Book

If you’re involved in business, this second edition of Service Design will help you gain knowledge about how best to serve your customers. The following people would find it especially beneficial:

• Service designers
• User experience designers, graphic designers, or any type of designer
• Product and project managers
• Leaders of organizations
• Marketing people
• Customer service representatives

Takeaways

If you’re new to service design, this book will help you:

• Uncover the true meaning of service design.
• Learn how services differ from products.
• Prototype different service experiences.
• Measure services and journeys.
• Make the case for return on investment to an organization with service design.
• Deploy service design in a business.
• Show how to design with people, not for them.
• Understand how to work across time and multiple touchpoints.

Why do crucial customer insights often fail to drive product decisions? The answer: wasted research. Jake Burghardt identifies the insidious root causes of research waste, giving actionable ideas to increase the impact of siloed research. You’ll learn to enhance collaboration, maximize learning, and drive research-informed product launches. Anyone—from UX researchers and insight generators to data scientists and CX analysts—will benefit from these crucial customer insights.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is for anyone who’s seen too many important customer insights that failed to drive next steps in their business. It’s for leaders and practitioners who want to experiment with new ways to increase their organization’s research use in product development and delivery. Specifically, it’s perfect for researchers from any discipline from UX to CX to sales to data science. It’s also a must-read for leaders of product, design, marketing, and engineering —anyone who wants to improve decision-making based on available customer research. And that includes operations people.

Takeaways

 
• Uncover tools and methods to reduce research waste.
 
• Learn how to find and use hidden research that might have lasting impact on your organization.
 
• Discover knowledge-consolidating tools and requirements for repositories.
 
• Increase the impact of any type of customer research on your organization.
 
• Note the special “IDEA” sections that show possible actions to choose based on what makes sense for your current resources and organizational context
 
• See “You Might Be Asking” sidebars, which give answers to common questions.
 
• Search for “Imagine a Way Forward” sidebars that highlight special scenarios—telling a story of action ideas as step-by-step narratives.
 
• Look for insightful interviews from experts in the field.
 
• Read the chapter summaries of key proposals to get more value from research, including a distillation of what success might look like.

Want to know what your users are thinking? If you’re a product manager or developer, this book will help you learn the techniques for finding the answers to your most burning questions about your customers. With step-by-step guidance, Validating Product Ideas shows you how to tackle the research to build the best possible product.

Drawing from psychology, neuroscience, and years of real-world experience, We Need to Talk provides a practical framework for navigating difficult conversations with confidence and empathy. Whether you're dealing with workplace conflicts, team dynamics, or challenging personal discussions, this book equips you with the tools to transform confrontational situations into opportunities for growth and understanding. No scripts, no shortcuts—just proven strategies that work.

Who Should Read This Book

If you work with other humans, this book is for you. Whether you're a leader trying to build psychological safety on your team, an individual contributor navigating tricky workplace dynamics, or someone who wants to get better at having hard conversations, you'll find practical tools here. While the examples come primarily from technology and creative fields, the framework works across industries and various roles. You'll learn how to transform potentially confrontational situations into opportunities for growth and understanding, all while staying true to your authentic communication style. This isn't about becoming a conflict expert—it's about you feeling confident and capable when those inevitable tough conversations arise.

Takeaways

• Learn the core principles underlying difficult conversations. 
• Delve into how your brain processes conflict. 
• Study a multitude of techniques for maintaining psychological safety. 
• Learn to apply practical solutions to solving real-world problems.  
• Practice handling difficult conversations in your own authentic way. 
• Figure out specific techniques for staying centered, asking the right questions, and keeping your cool when caught off guard. 
• Learn how to navigate the tricky waters of conflict when you don’t agree with your boss. 
• Study de-escalation techniques for a tense situation in order to guide conversations back to productive territory.  
• Say no and mean it!

Without words, apps would be an unusable jumble of shapes and icons, while voice interfaces and chatbots wouldn't even exist. Words make software human–centered, and require just as much thought as the branding and code. This book will show you how to give your users clarity, test your words, and collaborate with your team. You'll see that writing is designing.

After years of building the same interface elements, some designers and developers get wise and try to create reusable, common solutions to help everyone stop reinventing the wheel every time. Most fail. In Design That Scales, design systems expert Dan Mall draws on his extensive experience helping some of the world's most recognizable brands create design practices that are truly sustainable and successful.

Who Should Read This Book?

Takeaways

• A design system is crucial for any organization managing two or more digital products. Learn how to create, manage, and sustain a successful design system.
• See how the ecosystem of a design system works in order to understand the context for success.
• Figure out where the people involved in a design system fit and how they can best collaborate.
• Learn the metrics for success within a design system and how to measure them.
• Determine the best techniques for marketing your design system to stakeholders.
• Learn what guidance and relationships are crucial for a design system to succeed.
• See the end-of-chapter questions that highlight how to guide your design system to a profitable outcome.

If you are in charge of the user experience, development, or strategy for a web site, A Web for Everyone will help you make your site accessible without sacrificing design or innovation. Rooted in universal design principles, this book provides solutions: practical advice and examples of how to create sites that everyone can use.

Remote studies allow you to recruit subjects quickly, cheaply, and immediately, and give you the opportunity to observe users as they behave naturally in their own environment. In Remote Research, Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte teach you how to design and conduct remote research studies, top to bottom, with little more than a phone and a laptop.

Liftoff! is your guide to leveling up as a design manager and leader. Its experience–driven approach—written by designers for designers—will help you hire and scale teams, develop careers, learn why diversity matters to your business, and solidify design's role in your organization. Liftoff! will elevate your skills to lead your team and company to new heights.

Many designers enjoy the interfaces seen in science fiction films and television shows. Freed from the rigorous constraints of designing for real users, sci-fi production designers develop blue-sky interfaces that are inspiring, humorous, and even instructive. By carefully studying these “outsider” user interfaces, designers can derive lessons that make their real-world designs more cutting edge and successful.

Behavior change design creates entrancing—and effective—products and experiences. Whether you've studied psychology or are new to the field, you can incorporate behavior change principles into your designs to help people achieve meaningful goals, learn and grow, and connect with one another. Engaged offers practical tips for design professionals to apply the psychology of engagement to their work.

Eye tracking is a widely used research method, but there are many questions and misconceptions about how to effectively apply it. Eye Tracking the User Experience—the first how-to book about eye tracking for UX practitioners—offers step-by-step advice on how to plan, prepare, and conduct eye tracking studies; how to analyze and interpret eye movement data; and how to successfully communicate eye tracking findings.

We all tell stories. It's one of the most natural ways to share information, as old as the human race. This book is not about a new technique, but how to use something we already know in a new way. Stories help us gather and communicate user research, put a human face on analytic data, communicate design ideas, encourage collaboration and innovation, and create a sense of shared history and purpose. This book looks across the full spectrum of user experience design to discover when and how to use stories to improve our products. Whether you are a researcher, designer, analyst or manager, you will find ideas and techniques you can put to use in your practice.

Good content isn’t magical—it's thoughtful, creative, and well researched words put together with finesse. In Strategic Content Design, you'll learn how to create effective content, using hard–won research methods, best practices, and proven tips for conducting quantitative and qualitative content–focused research and testing.

"This is me, shouting from the rooftops: Strategic Content Design belongs in the hands of absolutely anyone who cares about content in UX—by which I mean EVERYONE."
—Kristina Halvorson, CEO and Founder, Brain Traffic

Who Should Read This Book?

Takeaways

• Realistically assess the current state of your content.
• Learn how to write content research questions.
• Create a content research study and evaluate your content&apos:s effectiveness.
• Identify which specific words or content elements to test. Analyze your research results.
• Identify which specific words or content elements to test.
• Determine which research methods and tools are ideal for your team's content research needs.
• Elevate the role of content design in your company, proving that content is key to creating an outstanding customer experience—and improving your bottom line.
• Create a content research roadmap.
• Learn from professional content people in case studies that highlight practical examples.