Paul Boag

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.

Our love affair with the digital interface is out of control. We&;ve embraced it in the boardroom, the bedroom, and the bathroom. Screens have taken over our lives. Most people spend over eight hours a day staring at a screen, and some &;technological innovators&; are hoping to grab even more of your eyeball time. You have screens in your pocket, in your car, on your appliances, and maybe even on your face. Average smartphone users check their phones 150 times a day, responding to the addictive buzz of Facebook or emails or Twitter. Are you sick? There&;s an app for that! Need to pray? There&;s an app for that! Dead? Well, there&;s an app for that, too! And most apps are intentionally addictive distractions that end up taking our attention away from things like family, friends, sleep, and oncoming traffic. There&;s a better way. In this book, innovator Golden Krishna challenges our world of nagging, screen-based bondage, and shows how we can build a technologically advanced world without digital interfaces. In his insightful, raw, and often hilarious criticism, Golden reveals fascinating ways to think beyond screens using three principles that lead to more meaningful innovation. Whether you&;re working in technology, or just wary of a gadget-filled future, you&;ll be enlighted and entertained while discovering that the best interface is no interface.

*New Kindle Version Now Available* We have redone the Kindle version in full reflowable format that should now work flawlessly on Kindle. WHY DO PEOPLE DECIDE TO BUY A PRODUCT? Trust the information you provide? Take action at your web site? Neuro Web Design applies the research on motivation, decision making and neuroscience to design. You will learn the unconscious reasons for people’s actions, how emotions affect decisions, and how to apply the principles of persuasion to design products that encourage people to click.

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 use, the architecture of information that we choose greatly affects our ability to deliver our intended message to our users.We all face messes made of information and people. This book defines the word “mess” the same way that most dictionaries do: “A situation where the interactions between people and information are confusing or full of difficulties.” — Who doesn’t bump up against messes made of information and people every day? How to Make Sense of Any Mess provides a seven step process for making sense of any mess. Each chapter contains a set of lessons as well as workbook exercises architected to help you to work through your own mess.

Once you catch the user experience bug, the world changes. Doors open the wrong way, websites don't work, and companies don't seem to care. And while anyone can learn the UX remedies usability testing, personas, prototyping and so on unless your organization 'gets it', putting them into practice is trickier. Undercover User Experience is a pragmatic guide from the front lines, giving frank advice on making UX work in real companies with real problems. Readers will learn how to fit research, ideation, prototyping and testing into their daily workflow, and how to design good user experiences under the all-too-common constraints of time, budget and culture.

The co-founder and longtime president of Pixar updates and expands his 2014 New York Times bestseller on creative leadership, reflecting on the management principles that built Pixar’s singularly successful culture, and on all he learned during the past nine years that allowed Pixar to retain its creative culture while continuing to evolve. “Might be the most thoughtful management book ever.”—Fast Company For nearly thirty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner eighteen Academy Awards. The joyous storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable. As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the twenty-five movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as: • Give a good idea to a mediocre team and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team and they will either fix it or come up with something better. • It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them. • The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them. • A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody. Creativity, Inc. has been significantly expanded to illuminate the continuing development of the unique culture at Pixar. It features a new introduction, two entirely new chapters, four new chapter postscripts, and changes and updates throughout. Pursuing excellence isn’t a one-off assignment but an ongoing, day-in, day-out, full-time job. And Creativity, Inc. explores how it is done.

Transform: A rebel's guide for digital transformation. Are you an optimist? Are you a rebel? Do you think that because of digital technology, power is shifting away from organizations towards citizens and customers? Are you a digital change agent? Do you want to transform your organization? Then this book is here to help you. Do you want to transform the complex into the simple? Do you like challenges and see yourself primarily as a problem solver? Are you the annoying person who constantly asks: “Why?” Are you empathetic? Do you like to listen, watch, observe? Are you also rational? Are you willing to go with the evidence and data even when it goes against your gut instinct? This is Gerry McGovern’s sixth book on web culture and economy. He is the founder and CEO of Customer Carewords, a company that has developed a set of methods to understand customer top tasks.

It's been known for years that usability testing can dramatically improve products. But with a typical price tag of $5,000 to $10,000 for a usability consultant to conduct each round of tests, it rarely happens. In this how-to companion to Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Steve Krug spells out a streamlined approach to usability testing that anyone can easily apply to their own Web site, application, or other product. (As he said in Don't Make Me Think, "It's not rocket surgery".) Using practical advice, plenty of illustrations, and his trademark humor, Steve explains how to: Test any design, from a sketch on a napkin to a fully-functioning Web site or applicationKeep your focus on finding the most important problems (because no one has the time or resources to fix them all)Fix the problems that you find, using his "The least you can do" approachBy paring the process of testing and fixing products down to its essentials ("A morning a month, that's all we ask"), Rocket Surgery makes it realistic for teams to test early and often, catching problems while it's still easy to fix them. Rocket Surgery Made Easy adds demonstration videos to the proven mix of clear writing, before-and-after examples, witty illustrations, and practical advice that made Don't Make Me Think so popular.