Design

WE DESIGN TO ELICIT RESPONSES from people. We want them to buy something, read more, or take action of some kind. Designing without understanding what makes people act the way they do is like exploring a new city without a map: results will be haphazard, confusing, and inefficient. This book combines real science and research with practical examples to deliver a guide every designer needs. With this book you'll design more intuitive and engaging apps, software, websites and products that match the way people think, decide and behave.

INCREASE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF YOUR PRODUCTS.

Apply psychology and behavioral science to your designs.

Here are some of the questions this book will answer:

• What grabs and holds attention.
• What makes memories stick?
• What is more important, peripheral or central vision?
• Can you predict the types of errors people will make?
• What is the limit to someone's social circle?
• What line length for text is best?
• Are some fonts better than others?

These are just a few of the questions that the book answers in its deep-dive exploration of what makes people tick.

About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, Fourth Edition is the latest update to the book that shaped and evolved the landscape of interaction design. This comprehensive guide takes the worldwide shift to smartphones and tablets into account. New information includes discussions on mobile apps, touch interfaces, screen size considerations, and more. The new full-color interior and unique layout better illustrate modern design concepts.

The interaction design profession is blooming with the success of design-intensive companies, priming customers to expect "design" as a critical ingredient of marketplace success. Consumers have little tolerance for websites, apps, and devices that don't live up to their expectations, and the responding shift in business philosophy has become widespread. About Face is the book that brought interaction design out of the research labs and into the everyday lexicon, and the updated Fourth Edition continues to lead the way with ideas and methods relevant to today's design practitioners and developers.

Updated information includes:

• Contemporary interface, interaction, and product design methods
• Design for mobile platforms and consumer electronics
• State-of-the-art interface recommendations and up-to-date examples
• Updated Goal-Directed Design methodology

Designers and developers looking to remain relevant through the current shift in consumer technology habits will find About Face to be a comprehensive, essential resource.

Proven techniques and principles for modernizing legacy systems into new architectures that deliver serious competitive advantage.

For a business to thrive, it needs a modern software architecture that is aligned with its corporate architecture. This book presents concrete practices that sync software, product, strategy, team dynamics, and work practices. You’ll evolve your technical and social architecture together, reducing needless dependencies and achieving faster flow of innovation across your organization.

In Architecture Modernization: Socio-technical alignment of software, strategy, and structure you’ll learn how to:

• Identify strategic ambitions and challenges using listening and mapping tours
• Visualize your business landscape and crucial capabilities with Wardley Mapping
• Create a product taxonomy as a framework for your architecture
• Run big picture EventStorming workshops to map business domains
• Apply Team Topologies patterns to identify and refine value streams
• Design loosely coupled, domain-aligned software architectures
• Build internal developer platforms for rapid, reliable evolution
• Implement data mesh principles and tools to revolutionize data engineering
• Deliver compelling modernization roadmaps focused on continuous value

Architecture Modernization: Socio-technical alignment of software, strategy, and structure shows you how to turn the practice of architecting systems into a transformative process for your entire company. Chapter-by-chapter, you’ll identify the reasons and benefits of modernization, design an architecture that works for your business, and then implement your new approach in a progressive and sustainable manner. Every technique is illustrated with insightful industry examples and an interactive Miro board that lets you dig deeper.

Solve common application design and usability issues with flair! These essential design and UX techniques will help you create good user experiences, iterate smoothly on frontend features, and collaborate effectively with designer colleagues.

In Design for Developers you will learn how to:

• Use color, typography, and layout to create hierarchy on a web page
• Apply color palettes consistently in a user interface
• Choose the correct typefaces and fonts
• Conduct user research to validate design decisions
• Quickly plan a website’s layout and structure

In Design for Developers, author Stephanie Stimac shares the unique insights she’s learned as a designer on the Microsoft Developer Experiences team. This one-of-a-kind book provides a developer-centric approach to the essential design fundamentals of modern web applications. You’ll learn how to craft a polished visual design with just color, space, and typeface, and put all your new skills into practice to design a website from scratch.

Design for the Mind: Seven Psychological Principles of Persuasive Design teaches web designers and developers how to create sites and applications that appeal to our innate natural responses as humans. Author Victor Yocco, a researcher on psychology and communication, introduces the most immediately relevant and applicable psychological concepts, breaks down each theory into easily-digested principles, then shows how they can be used to inform better design.

Designing good application interfaces isn’t easy now that companies need to create compelling, seamless user experiences across an exploding number of channels, screens, and contexts. In this updated third edition, you’ll learn how to navigate through the maze of design options. By capturing UI best practices as design patterns, this best-selling book provides solutions to common design problems.

You’ll learn patterns for mobile apps, web applications, and desktop software. Each pattern contains full-color examples and practical design advice you can apply immediately. Experienced designers can use this guide as an idea sourcebook, and novices will find a road map to the world of interface and interaction design.

• Understand your users before you start designing
• Build your software’s structure so it makes sense to users
• Design components to help users complete tasks on any device
• Learn how to promote wayfinding in your software
• Place elements to guide users to information and functions
• Learn how visual design can make or break product usability
• Display complex data with artful visualizations

Users experience the usability of a web site before they have committed to using it and before making any purchase decisions. The web is the ultimate environment for empowerment, and he or she who clicks the mouse decides everything. Designing Web Usability is the definitive guide to usability from Jakob Nielsen, the world's leading authority. Over 250,000 Internet professionals around the world have turned to this landmark book, in which Nielsen shares the full weight of his wisdom and experience. From content and page design to designing for ease of navigation and users with disabilities, he delivers complete direction on how to connect with any web user, in any situation. Nielsen has arrived at a series of principles that work in support of his findings:

1. That web users want to find what they're after quickly;
2. If they don't know what they're after, they nevertheless want to browse quickly and access information they come across in a logical manner.

This book is a must-have for anyone who thinks seriously about the web.

Hundreds of thousands of Web designers and developers have relied on web usability expert Steve Krug's guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design. Witty, commonsensical, and eminently practical, it's one of the best-loved and most recommended books on the subject.

• Fresh perspectives and examples
• New chapter on mobile usability
• Still short, profusely illustrated...and best of all-fun to read.

If you've read it before, you'll rediscover what made Don't Make Me Think so essential to Web designers and developers around the world. If you've never read it, you'll see why so many people have said it should be required reading for anyone working on websites.

"After reading it over a couple of hours and putting its ideas to work for the past five years, I can say it has done more to improve my abilities as a Web designer than any other book." -Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing with Web Standards

Hello Web Design teaches design principles, handy shortcuts, and quick solutions to common problems, so you can learn the fundamentals of design and get ahead in your career.

Using real-world examples and fun, beginner-friendly language, Hello Web Design offers everything you need to feel comfortable creating landing pages, presentation slides, online portfolios, and more, all in a beautiful package. From color theory and typography to the end user's experience, designer and developer Tracy Osborn gives you the tools and shortcuts you need to get started with web design—right now.

How do successful companies create products people can’t put down?

Why do some products capture widespread attention while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of sheer habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us? Nir Eyal answers these questions (and many more) by explaining the Hook Model—a four-step process embedded into the products of many successful companies to subtly encourage customer behavior. Through consecutive “hook cycles,” these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.

Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder—not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior.

Eyal provides readers with:

• Practical insights to create user habits that stick.
• Actionable steps for building products people love.
• Fascinating examples from the iPhone to Twitter, Pinterest to the Bible App, and many other habit-forming products.

Information architecture (IA) is far more challenging—and necessary—than ever. With the glut of information available today, anything your organization wants to share should be easy to find, navigate, and understand. But the experience you provide has to be familiar and coherent across multiple interaction channels, from the Web to smartphones, smartwatches, and beyond.

To guide you through this broad ecosystem, this popular guide—now in its fourth edition—provides essential concepts, methods, and techniques for digital design that have withstood the test of time. UX designers, product managers, developers, and anyone involved in digital design will learn how to create semantic structures that will help people engage with your message.

This book includes:

• An overview of IA and the problems it solves for creating effective digital products and services
• A deep dive into IA components, including organization, labeling, navigation, search, and metadata
• Processes and methods that take you from research to strategy, design, and IA implementation

How do today’s most successful tech companies—Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla—design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love—and that will work for your business.

With sections on assembling the right people and skillsets, discovering the right product, embracing an effective yet lightweight process, and creating a strong product culture, readers can take the information they learn and immediately leverage it within their own organizations—dramatically improving their own product efforts.

Whether you’re an early stage startup working to get to product/market fit, or a growth-stage company working to scale your product organization, or a large, long-established company trying to regain your ability to consistently deliver new value for your customers, INSPIRED will take you and your product organization to a new level of customer engagement, consistent innovation, and business success.

Filled with the author’s own personal stories—and profiles of some of today’s most-successful product managers and technology-powered product companies, including Adobe, Apple, BBC, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix—INSPIRED will show you how to turn up the dial of your own product efforts, creating technology products your customers love.

The first edition of INSPIRED, published ten years ago, established itself as the primary reference for technology product managers, and can be found on the shelves of nearly every successful technology product company worldwide. This thoroughly updated second edition shares the same objective of being the most valuable resource for technology product managers, yet it is completely new—sharing the latest practices and techniques of today’s most-successful tech product companies, and the men and women behind every great product.

A revision of the #1 text in the Human Computer Interaction field, Interaction Design, the third edition is an ideal resource for learning the interdisciplinary skills needed for interaction design, human-computer interaction, information design, web design and ubiquitous computing.

The authors are acknowledged leaders and educators in their field, with a strong global reputation. They bring depth of scope to the subject in this new edition, encompassing the latest technologies and devices including social networking, Web 2.0 and mobile devices. The third edition also adds, develops and updates cases, examples and questions to bring the book in line with the latest in Human Computer Interaction.

Interaction Design offers a cross-disciplinary, practical and process-oriented approach to Human Computer Interaction, showing not just what principles ought to apply to Interaction Design, but crucially how they can be applied. The book focuses on how to design interactive products that enhance and extend the way people communicate, interact and work. Motivating examples are included to illustrate both technical, but also social and ethical issues, making the book approachable and adaptable for both Computer Science and non-Computer Science users. Interviews with key HCI luminaries are included and provide an insight into current and future trends.

An understanding of psychology-specifically the psychology behind how users behave and interact with digital interfaces-is perhaps the single most valuable nondesign skill a designer can have. The most elegant design can fail if it forces users to conform to the design instead of working within the "blueprint" of how humans perceive and process the world around them.

This practical guide explains how you can apply key principles of psychology to build products and experiences that are more human-centered and intuitive. Author Jon Yablonski deconstructs familiar apps and experiences to provide clear examples of how UX designers can build interfaces that adapt to how users perceive and process digital interfaces.

You'll learn:

• How aesthetically pleasing design creates positive responses
• The principles of psychology most useful for designers
• How these psychology principles relate to UX heuristics
• Predictive models including Fitts's law, Jakob's law, and Hick's law
• Ethical implications of using psychology in design
• A practical framework for applying principles of psychology in your design process

This updated edition includes an even deeper connection to the underlying psychological concepts that govern the principles explored in the book, along with accompanying UX methods and techniques. Examples have been updated to ensure the deconstructed apps and experiences remain familiar and relevant.

Product management has become a critical function for modern organizations, from small startups to corporate enterprises. And yet, the day-to-day work of product management remains largely misunderstood. In theory, product managers are high-flying visionaries who build products that people love. In practice, they're hard-working facilitators who bring clarity and focus to their teams.

In this thoroughly revised and expanded edition, Matt LeMay provides real-world guidance for current and aspiring product managers. Updated for the era of remote and hybrid work, this book provides actionable answers to product management's most persistent and confounding questions, starting with: What exactly am I supposed to do all day?

With this book, you'll learn:

• What the day-to-day work of product management entails--and how to excel at it
• Why no job title or description will resolve the ambiguity of your role
• How to bridge the false dichotomy between "strategy" and "execution"
• Why the temptation to focus on decks and documentation can be bad for your team (and for you)
• How to prioritize your time and pick your battles

Make your ideas look awesome, without relying on a designer. Learn how to design beautiful user interfaces by yourself using specific tactics explained from a developer's point-of-view.

Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door.

The fault, argues this ingenious -- even liberating -- book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization.

The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time.

The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how -- and why -- some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.

Imagine, at a terrifyingly aggressive rate, everything you regularly use is being equipped with computer technology. Think about your phone, cameras, cars-everything-being automated and programmed by people who in their rush to accept the many benefits of the silicon chip, have abdicated their responsibility to make these products easy to use. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum argues that the business executives who make the decisions to develop these products are not the ones in control of the technology used to create them. Insightful and entertaining, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum uses the author's experiences in corporate America to illustrate how talented people continuously design bad software-based products and why we need technology to work the way average people think. Somewhere out there is a happy medium that makes these types of products both user and bottom-line friendly; this book discusses why we need to quickly find that medium.

For nearly 20 years, designers and non-designers alike have been introduced to the fundamental principles of great design by author Robin Williams. Through her straightforward and light-hearted style, Robin has taught hundreds of thousands of people how to make their designs look professional using four surprisingly simple principles. Now in its fourth edition, The Non-Designer’s Design Book offers even more practical design advice, including a new chapter on the fundamentals of typography, more quizzes and exercises to train your Designer Eye, updated projects for you to try, and new visual and typographic examples to inspire your creativity.

Whether you’re a Mac user or a Windows user, a type novice, or an aspiring graphic designer, you will find the instruction and inspiration to approach any design project with confidence.

This essential guide will teach you:

• The four principles of design that underlie every design project
• How to design with color
• How to design with type
• How to combine typefaces for maximum effect
• How to see and think like a professional designer
• Specific tips on designing newsletters, brochures, flyers, and other projects

Usability Matters: Mobile-first UX for developers and other accidental designers gives you practical advice and guidance on how to create attractive, elegant, and useful user interfaces for native and web-based mobile apps.

Thoroughly reviewed and eagerly anticipated by the agile community, User Stories Applied offers a requirements process that saves time, eliminates rework, and leads directly to better software.

The best way to build software that meets users' needs is to begin with "user stories": simple, clear, brief descriptions of functionality that will be valuable to real users. In User Stories Applied, Mike Cohn provides you with a front-to-back blueprint for writing these user stories and weaving them into your development lifecycle.

You'll learn what makes a great user story, and what makes a bad one. You'll discover practical ways to gather user stories, even when you can't speak with your users. Then, once you've compiled your user stories, Cohn shows how to organize them, prioritize them, and use them for planning, management, and testing.

• User role modeling: understanding what users have in common, and where they differ
• Gathering stories: user interviewing, questionnaires, observation, and workshops
• Working with managers, trainers, salespeople and other "proxies"
• Writing user stories for acceptance testing
• Using stories to prioritize, set schedules, and estimate release costs
• Includes end-of-chapter practice questions and exercises

User Stories Applied will be invaluable to every software developer, tester, analyst, and manager working with any agile method: XP, Scrum... or even your own home-grown approach.

User story mapping is a valuable tool for software development, once you understand why and how to use it. This insightful book examines how this often misunderstood technique can help your team stay focused on users and their needs without getting lost in the enthusiasm for individual product features.

Author Jeff Patton shows you how changeable story maps enable your team to hold better conversations about the project throughout the development process. Your team will learn to come away with a shared understanding of what you’re attempting to build and why.

• Get a high-level view of story mapping, with an exercise to learn key concepts quickly
• Understand how stories really work, and how they come to life in Agile and Lean projects
• Dive into a story’s lifecycle, starting with opportunities and moving deeper into discovery
• Prepare your stories, pay attention while they’re built, and learn from those you convert to working software

Value Proposition Design helps you tackle a core challenge of every business — creating compelling products and services customers want to buy. This practical book, paired with its online companion, will teach you the processes and tools you need to succeed.

Using the same stunning visual format as the authors' global bestseller, Business Model Generation, this sequel explains how to use the "Value Proposition Canvas" a practical tool to design, test, create, and manage products and services customers actually want.

Value Proposition Design is for anyone who has been frustrated by business meetings based on endless conversations, hunches and intuitions, expensive new product launches that blew up, or simply disappointed by the failure of a good idea. The book will help you understand the patterns of great value propositions, get closer to customers, and avoid wasting time with ideas that won't work. You'll learn the simple but comprehensive process of designing and testing value propositions, taking the guesswork out of creating products and services that perfectly match customers' needs and desires.

Practical exercises, illustrations and tools help you immediately improve your product, service, or new business idea. In addition the book gives you exclusive access to an online companion on Strategyzer.com. You will be able to complete interactive exercises, assess your work, learn from peers, and download pdfs, checklists, and more.

Value Proposition Design complements and perfectly integrates with the "Business Model Canvas" from Business Model Generation, a tool embraced by startups and large corporations such as MasterCard, 3M, Coca Cola, GE, Fujitsu, LEGO, Colgate-Palmolive, and many more.

Value Proposition Design gives you a proven methodology for success, with value propositions that sell, embedded in profitable business models.

White Space Is Not Your Enemy is a practical graphic design and layout guide that introduces concepts and practices necessary for producing effective visual communication across a variety of formats—from web to print. Sections on Gestalt theory, color theory, and WET layout are expanded to offer more in-depth content on those topics.