Rosenfeld Media

Information is easy. Understanding is hard.

From incomprehensible tax policies to confusing medical explanations, we're swamped with information that we can'’t make sense of. Figure It Out shows us how to transform information into better presentations, better meetings, better software, and better decisions. So take heart: under the guidance of Anderson and Fast, we can, in fact, figure it out—for ourselves and for others.

"Because time, attention, and resources are finite, wise prioritization lies at the heart of any flourishing organization or meaningful life. Yet there's surprisingly little actionable advice on how to do it well—and many seductive reasons to avoid it entirely. This approachable, psychologically astute, and deeply practical book has the potential to change all that. Reading it is well worth your time."
—Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Managing Priorities is your guide to prioritizing anything—anytime and anywhere. Harry Max digs into the best practices for prioritization at Apple, DreamWorks, NASA, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, and beyond, and brings them together in a single, practical method that you can apply step by step.

Who Should Read This Book?

Every business person who is even remotely interested in prioritization should read Managing Priorities. Whatever you need to prioritize—tasks, goals, OKRs, projects—this book is for you. Specific chapters are dedicated to what needs to happen and when for individuals, teams, and whole organizations.

Takeaways

• Learn what prioritization is.
• Gain insight into the costs of not prioritizing intentionally.
• Explore different methods of prioritization, including the Eisenhower Matrix, the Analytic Hierarchy Process, the Max Priorities Pyramid, Paired Comparison, Stack Ranking, and more (highlighted in the Appendix).
• Apply the author's DEGAP® method of prioritization with its five phases: Decide, Engage, Gather, Arrange, Prioritize.
• Identify, understand, and address your current state or lack of prioritization (the context of your problem, the people involved, and the issues surrounding timing).
• Use a scale to differentiate items to prioritize and arrange them appropriately.
• Select an approach to prioritization that works for your specific situation.

Today's radically complex problems require people to lead with design. 

Changemakers is an essential playbook for designers and nondesigners who want to drive change at work, at home, and in their communities. Groundbreaking designers Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland—armed with insights from some of today's top minds in business, tech, and social justice—offer a pragmatic, people–centered approach to change.

Who Should Read This Book?

Takeaways

• A new approach to change is emerging, and design is at the forefront of responding and provoking change.
• Purpose and passion are essential changemaker qualities.
• Change involves choosing the right problem and finding an entity open to change.
• This book will be your guide for creating and maintaining change in your organization—for you, your team, and your stakeholders.
• Leaders can design change and affect the world—this book will show them how to become that kind of leader.
• Each chapter has critical takeaways at the end of the chapter, summarizing important points.
• Each chapter gives the reader a list of extra sources to gain further knowledge.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Better thinking makes you a better person. And few things extend your mind as quickly and powerfully as the humble note. Notes let you fulfill commitments, manage complicated projects, and make your ideas real. Digital notes take you even further. By using the right tools and a bit of discipline, you can cultivate a “personal knowledge garden" where your thinking will blossom.

Who Should Read This Book?

Takeaways

• Learn best-practice note-taking principles so you can take more concise notes.
• Connect your notes to one another to create a personal network of ideas (your own personal “knowledge garden”).
• Capture ideas before you lose them.
• Organize your notes so that you can find and make sense of them later.
• Learn how connected notes can spark insight and lead to new ideas and learning.
• Explore how notes can help you collaborate with other minds, including artificial ones
• Learn how to use Obsidian, a powerful digital note-taking tool.
• Follow the how-to exercises to lead you through the note-taking maze.

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.