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.

The digital world is transitioning from text to media: photos, audio files, video clips, animations, games, and more. Enterprises of all kinds struggle with how to manage those media assets. Digital professionals who want to master the life cycles behind creating, storing, and reusing media need the inside scoop on how digital and media asset management technology really works.

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.