Design - Books

Learn the secrets of Tony Fadell's success.

A bold new book reveals how we can tap the intelligence that exists beyond our brains—in our bodies, our surroundings, and our relationships

It's the little things that turn a good digital product into a great one. With this full color practical book, you'll learn how to design effective microinteractions: the small details that exist inside and around features. How can users change a setting? How do they turn on mute, or know they have a new email message?Through vivid, real-world examples from today's devices and applications, author Dan Saffer walks…

What does it take to be the leader of a design firm or group? We often assume they have all the answers, but in this rapidly evolving industry they're forced to find their way like the rest of us. So how do good design leaders manage? If you lead a design group, or want to understand the people who do, this insightful book explores behind-the-scenes strategies and tactics from leaders of top design companies…

Design has become the key link between users and today's complex and rapidly evolving digital experiences, and designers are starting to be included in strategic conversations about the products and services that enterprises ultimately deliver. This has led to companies building in-house digital/experience design teams at unprecedented rates, but many of them don't understand how to get the most out of their…

How inclusive methods can build elegant design solutions that work for all.Sometimes designed objects reject their users: a computer mouse that doesn't work for left-handed people, for example, or a touchscreen payment system that only works for people who read English phrases, have 20/20 vision, and use a credit card. Something as simple as color choices can render a product unusable for millions. These mismatches…

Donald Norman's best-selling plea for user-friendly design, with more than 175,000 copies sold to date, is now a Basic paperback."Provocative."--Time magazine

From the bestselling author of The Bomber Mafia: discover Malcolm Gladwell's breakthrough debut and explore the science behind viral trends in business, marketing, and human behavior. The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but…

Lessons for a new generation of leaders on teamwork, meetings, conversations, free food, social media, apologizing, and other topics.When designer and computer scientist John Maeda was tapped to be president of the celebrated Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, he had to learn how to be a leader quickly. He had to transform himself from a tenured professor--with a love of argument for argument's sake and the…

Modernist aesthetics in architecture, art, and product design are familiar to many. In soaring glass structures or minimalist canvases, we recognize a time of vast technological advance which affirmed the power of human beings to reshape their environment and to break, radically, from the conventions or constraints of the past. Less well-known, but no less fascinating, is the distillation of modernism in graphic…

Design is one of the most powerful forces in our lives--and it has never been more exciting. At a time when so many aspects of our lives are changing at a relentless speed on an unprecedented scale, design is increasingly seen as a way to help us benefit from the opportunities created by those changes (and to avoid their dangers).Design is responding to an age of intense economic, political and ecological…

Everything is getting more complex. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of information we encounter each day. Whether at work, at school, or in our personal endeavors, there's a deepening (and inescapable) need for people to work with and understand information. Information architecture is the way that we arrange the parts of something to make it understandable as a whole. When we make things for others to…

Words on Paper [Paperback] - The Shape of Design is an odd little design book. Instead of talking about typography, grids, or logos, it focuses on storytelling, co-dependency, and craft. It tries to supplement the abundance of technical talk and how-to elsewhere by elevating why great work is done.  Shape is a book about objectives, and it zooms out to answer a couple big questions: How does it feel to make things for other people? And how can we do so in a meaningful, engaged way? Size: 4.25" x 7" First Edition, Fourth Printing.

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. Hear author Leah Buley on The Rosenfeld Review Podcast The Rosenfeld Review Podcast (Rosenfeld Media) · Beyond Usability Testing: a Chat with Leah Buley 1-933820-18-7 1-933820-89-6

What this bundle includes: Mental Models: A roll-up-your-sleeves book for designers, managers, and anyone else interested in making design strategic, and successful.   Interviewing Users: Learn to conduct interviews with anyone. And glean rich insights from each user you speak with. The Jobs To Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: 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. Practical Empathy: Make better decisions, improve your strategy, and collaborate successfully. Build Better Products: Develop products and features that improve your business’s bottom line while dramatically improving customer experience. Validating Product Ideas: Gain the strategy and lean tactics to create an effective user research process from beginning to end.

Why we don't really want simplicity, and how we can learn to live with complexity. If only today's technology were simpler! It's the universal lament, but it's wrong. In this provocative and informative book, Don Norman writes that the complexity of our technology must mirror the complexity and richness of our lives. It's not complexity that's the problem, it's bad design. Bad design complicates things unnecessarily and confuses us. Good design can tame complexity.Norman gives us a crash course in the virtues of complexity. Designers have to produce things that tame complexity. But we too have to do our part: we have to take the time to learn the structure and practice the skills. This is how we mastered reading and writing, driving a car, and playing sports, and this is how we can master our complex tools. Complexity is good. Simplicity is misleading. The good life is complex, rich, and rewarding—but only if it is understandable, sensible, and meaningful.