Jared Spool

Jared Spool

Maker of Awesomeness at @CenterCentre – @UIE. Guiding orgs to deliver well-designed products & services. (He/Him) Former @USDS.

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30+ Book Recommendations by Jared Spool

  • Whether you’re designing consumer electronics, medical devices, enterprise Web apps, or new ways to check out at the supermarket, today’s digitally-enabled products and services provide both great opportunities to deliver compelling user experiences and great risks of driving your customers crazy with complicated, confusing technology. Designing successful products and services in the digital age requires a multi-disciplinary team with expertise in interaction design, visual design, industrial design, and other disciplines. It also takes the ability to come up with the big ideas that make a desirable product or service, as well as the skill and perseverance to execute on the thousand small ideas that get your design into the hands of users. It requires expertise in project management, user research, and consensus-building. This comprehensive, full-color volume addresses all of these and more with detailed how-to information, real-life examples, and exercises. Topics include assembling a design team, planning and conducting user research, analyzing your data and turning it into personas, using scenarios to drive requirements definition and design, collaborating in design meetings, evaluating and iterating your design, and documenting finished design in a way that works for engineers and stakeholders alike.

    @usiriczman The first ones that come to mind are: @danachis’s Handbook of Usability Testing @indiyoung’s books on Mental Models and Empathy @kimgoodwin’s Design for the Digital Age @leahbuley’s UX Team of One @vlh’s book on Animation There are so many others, it would be hard to list all.

  • @usiriczman The first ones that come to mind are: @danachis’s Handbook of Usability Testing @indiyoung’s books on Mental Models and Empathy @kimgoodwin’s Design for the Digital Age @leahbuley’s UX Team of One @vlh’s book on Animation There are so many others, it would be hard to list all.

  • Whether it?s software, a cell phone, or a refrigerator, your customer wants?no, expects?your product to be easy to use. This fully revised handbook provides clear, step-by-step guidelines to help you test your product for usability. Completely updated with current industry best practices, it can give you that all-important marketplace advantage: products that perform the way users expect. You?ll learn to recognize factors that limit usability, decide where testing should occur, set up a test plan to assess goals for your product?s usability, and more.

    @usiriczman The first ones that come to mind are: @danachis’s Handbook of Usability Testing @indiyoung’s books on Mental Models and Empathy @kimgoodwin’s Design for the Digital Age @leahbuley’s UX Team of One @vlh’s book on Animation There are so many others, it would be hard to list all.

  • @usiriczman The first ones that come to mind are: @danachis’s Handbook of Usability Testing @indiyoung’s books on Mental Models and Empathy @kimgoodwin’s Design for the Digital Age @leahbuley’s UX Team of One @vlh’s book on Animation There are so many others, it would be hard to list all.

  • I’m excited to read this book. https://t.co/2nRfAoi5aQ

  • From the National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning comes a bracingly original approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society--and in ourselves. "The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it--and then dismantle it." Ibram X. Kendi's concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America--but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it. In this book, Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science, bringing it all together with an engaging personal narrative of his own awakening to antiracism. How to Be an Antiracist is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond an awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a truly just and equitable society. Advance praise for How to Be an Antiracist "This latest from the National Book Award-winning author is no guidebook to getting woke. . . . Rather, it is a combination of memoir and extension of . . . Kendi's towering Stamped From the Beginning that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. . . . Never wavering . . . Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth. . . . If Kendi is justifiably hard on America, he's just as hard on himself. . . . This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory. Not an easy read but an essential one."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Ibram Kendi is today's visionary in the enduring struggle for racial justice. In this personal and revelatory new work, he yet again holds up a transformative lens, challenging both mainstream and antiracist orthodoxy. He illuminates the foundations of racism in revolutionary new ways, and I am consistently challenged and inspired by his analysis. How to Be an Antiracist offers us a necessary and critical way forward."--Robin DiAngelo, New York Times bestselling author of White Fragility

    @SamuelHulick While privilege is fundamental to understanding the inequities of system racism, the book is quite good at just defining and talking the basic philosophy in inequity as it exists anywhere. I still recommend.

  • Mapping Experiences

    James Kalbach

    If you want to create products and services that provide real value, you should first identify touchpoints—areas where business and customer needs intersect. This practical book shows you how. Using various mapping techniques from UX design, you’ll learn how to turn customer observations into actionable insight for product design. Author Jim Kalbach, Principal UX Designer with Citrix, introduces you to the principles behind alignment diagrams—a class of deliverable also known as experience mapping—using several examples. You’ll learn how to visually map your existing customer experience, based on user research, and demonstrate how and where customer perspectives intersect with business goals. Using alignment diagrams, you’ll not only be able to orchestrate business-customer touchpoints, but also gain stakeholder support for a product or service that provides value to both your business and your customers. This book is ideal for product managers, marketers, customer experience professionals, and designers.

    @CharlesGedeon I’m a big fan of @JimKalbach’s Mapping Experiences as a must-read resource. https://t.co/mpILYNrs7t

  • Mapping Experiences

    James Kalbach

    If you want to create products and services that provide real value, you should first identify touchpoints—areas where business and customer needs intersect. This practical book shows you how. Using various mapping techniques from UX design, you’ll learn how to turn customer observations into actionable insight for product design. Author Jim Kalbach, Principal UX Designer with Citrix, introduces you to the principles behind alignment diagrams—a class of deliverable also known as experience mapping—using several examples. You’ll learn how to visually map your existing customer experience, based on user research, and demonstrate how and where customer perspectives intersect with business goals. Using alignment diagrams, you’ll not only be able to orchestrate business-customer touchpoints, but also gain stakeholder support for a product or service that provides value to both your business and your customers. This book is ideal for product managers, marketers, customer experience professionals, and designers.

    @ianjmacintosh I highly recommend @JimKalbach’s Mapping Experiences book. https://t.co/mpILYNrs7t

  • To every designer who has wondered what it’s like to work in gov’t to make the world a better place: @cydharrell is talking about exactly this in tonight’s @QuarantineBook club meeting. Don’t miss it! Cyd is awesome and her new book is fantastic. https://t.co/uiVNzHc77b

  • @ASquareNow @berkun Depending on what you want to know after that, there are many directions to go in. Right now, I’m a big fan of @ChrisRisdon & @ptquattlebaum’s Orchestrating Experiences: https://t.co/GXNUoMOtmx

  • Everything we use, from social media, to our homes, to our highways, was designed by someone. But how did they decide on what was good for the rest of us? What did they get right and where have they let us down? And what can we learn from the way these experts think that can help us in how we make decisions in our own lives? In How Design Makes The World, bestselling author and designer Scott Berkun takes readers on a journey exploring how designers of all kinds, from software engineers, to urban planners, have succeeded and failed us. By examining daily experiences like going to work, shopping for food, or even just using social media on their phones, readers will learn to see the world in a new and powerful way. They'll ask better questions of the things they buy, use, and make, and discover how easy it is to use ideas from great designers to improve their everyday lives.

    @ASquareNow A great place to start is @berkun’s How Design Makes the World: https://t.co/EbCnDpwNVi

  • Married to the Brand

    William J. McEwen

    Using sixty years of global research from Gallup as well as many consumer stories, the author shows why most advertising fails and identifies the qualities ahat make an ad connect with consumers. 50,000 first printing.

    @mokemonster What I recommend is you read Gallup’s book, Married to the Brand, which discusses the instrument and how they made it. (Sauro didn’t do that, so he just made up how he thought it was used.) If you still have questions, I’d be happy to get on a call and talk about it.

  • Conversations are a large part of how we work together as a team. Designers are no different, but there are not many resources available that concentrate on these necessary soft-skills. This book provides practical and actionable insights to help your team give and receive constructive criticism. For managers, this book discusses proven tools to set a foundation for your team to stay focused on overall goals, and how to handle negative critiques. As an added bonus, the book also includes a Critique Cheat Sheet so you can quickly reference strategies and tools from top industry experts.

    This is one of the books I recommend the most. Few things can radically improve a design team’s influence on the products their org delivers than following the wealth of advice contained inside this book. Congrats @adamconnor & @aaroni! https://t.co/Fy9IgNszqn

  • Paper Prototyping

    Carolyn Snyder

    The practical guide on using paper prototyping when designing user interfaces.

    @vino15 Well, Carolyn Snyder’s Paper Prototyping book was a direct outcome of this work: https://t.co/H1dWeOpMuv I don’t think we’ve ever written a case study or reflection on the design exercise. It’s a great idea.

  • How to design and market services to create outstanding customer experiences Service design thinking is the designing and marketing of services that improve the customer experience, and the interactions between the service providers and the customers. If you have two coffee shops right next to each other, and each sell the exact same coffee at the exact same price, service design is what makes you walk into one and not the other. Maybe one plays music and the other doesn't. Maybe one takes credit cards and the other is cash only. Maybe you like the layout of one over the other, or one has more comfortable seating. Maybe the staff at one is friendlier, or draws fun shapes on the top of their lattes. All of these nuances relate to service design. This Is Service Design Thinking combines the knowledge of twenty-three international authors and even more online contributors from the global service design community and is divided into three sections: Basics: outlines service design thinking along five basic principles Tools: describing a variety of tools and methods used in Service Design Thinking Cases: vivid examples for the introduced fundamentals with real-life case studies from 5 companies that did inspiring projects within the field of Service Design At the end, a one-page "Customer Journey Canvas" is included, which can be used to quickly sketch any service on a single sheet of paper—capturing different stakeholder concerns: e.g. customers, front-line staff and management.

    @MrStickdorn @SamuelHulick @erniedesigns @ChrisRisdon @ptquattlebaum Also an excellent book.

  • @MrStickdorn @SamuelHulick @erniedesigns @ChrisRisdon @ptquattlebaum Also an excellent book.

  • How can you establish a customer-centric culture in an organization? This is the first comprehensive book on how to actually do service design to improve the quality and the interaction between service providers and customers. You'll learn specific facilitation guidelines on how to run workshops, perform all of the main service design methods, implement concepts in reality, and embed service design successfully in an organization. Great customer experience needs a common language across disciplines to break down silos within an organization. This book provides a consistent model for accomplishing this and offers hands-on descriptions of every single step, tool, and method used. You'll be able to focus on your customers and iteratively improve their experience. Move from theory to practice and build sustainable business success.

    @MrStickdorn @SamuelHulick @erniedesigns @ChrisRisdon @ptquattlebaum Also an excellent book.

  • The Canterbury Tales

    Geoffrey Chaucer

    'Nevill Coghill's easy, seductive translation ensures that this, the most popular work in English Literature - now 600 years old - will run through yet more centuries' Melvyn Bragg In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer created one of the great touchstones of English literature. A storytelling competition within a group of pilgrims from all walks of life is the occasion for a series of tales that range from the Knight's account of courtly love and the ebullient Wife of Bath's Arthurian legend to the ribald anecdotes of the Miller and the Cook. This masterly and vivid modern English verse translation retains all the vigour and poetry of Chaucer's fourteenth-century Middle English. Translated by NEVILL COGHILL

    @gavindoughtie Um, no. The Canterbury Tales were written in 1387. I can still buy a book and read those pages, in the original english. The standard of the book doesn’t prevent me from reading the 633 year old content.

  • 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.

    @ppedrazzi My off-the-cuff recommendations: • @leahbuley’s UX Team of One • @odannyboy’s Microinteractions • @MrAlanCooper About face • @danachis Handbook of Usability Testing • @amyjokim Game Design Thinking That’s today’s recommendations. Ask me tomorrow and I’d give others.

  • Provides information on user interface design of small details that exist inside applications, covering such topics as triggers, rules, feedback, and loops and modes.

    @ppedrazzi My off-the-cuff recommendations: • @leahbuley’s UX Team of One • @odannyboy’s Microinteractions • @MrAlanCooper About face • @danachis Handbook of Usability Testing • @amyjokim Game Design Thinking That’s today’s recommendations. Ask me tomorrow and I’d give others.

  • About Face

    Alan Cooper

    The essential interaction design guide, fully revised and updated for the mobile age 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.

    @ppedrazzi My off-the-cuff recommendations: • @leahbuley’s UX Team of One • @odannyboy’s Microinteractions • @MrAlanCooper About face • @danachis Handbook of Usability Testing • @amyjokim Game Design Thinking That’s today’s recommendations. Ask me tomorrow and I’d give others.

  • Whether it?s software, a cell phone, or a refrigerator, your customer wants?no, expects?your product to be easy to use. This fully revised handbook provides clear, step-by-step guidelines to help you test your product for usability. Completely updated with current industry best practices, it can give you that all-important marketplace advantage: products that perform the way users expect. You?ll learn to recognize factors that limit usability, decide where testing should occur, set up a test plan to assess goals for your product?s usability, and more.

    @ppedrazzi My off-the-cuff recommendations: • @leahbuley’s UX Team of One • @odannyboy’s Microinteractions • @MrAlanCooper About face • @danachis Handbook of Usability Testing • @amyjokim Game Design Thinking That’s today’s recommendations. Ask me tomorrow and I’d give others.

  • Game Thinking

    Amy Jo Kim

    During her time working on genre-defining games like The Sims, Rock Band, and Ultima Online, Amy Jo learned that customers stick with products that help them get better at something they care about, like playing an instrument or leading a team. Amy Jo has used her insights from gaming to help hundreds of companies like Netflix, Disney, The New York Times, Ubisoft and Happify innovate faster and smarter, and drive long-term engagement.

    @ppedrazzi My off-the-cuff recommendations: • @leahbuley’s UX Team of One • @odannyboy’s Microinteractions • @MrAlanCooper About face • @danachis Handbook of Usability Testing • @amyjokim Game Design Thinking That’s today’s recommendations. Ask me tomorrow and I’d give others.

  • Everything we use, from social media, to our homes, to our highways, was designed by someone. But how did they decide on what was good for the rest of us? What did they get right and where have they let us down? And what can we learn from the way these experts think that can help us in how we make decisions in our own lives? In How Design Makes The World, bestselling author and designer Scott Berkun takes readers on a journey exploring how designers of all kinds, from software engineers, to urban planners, have succeeded and failed us. By examining daily experiences like going to work, shopping for food, or even just using social media on their phones, readers will learn to see the world in a new and powerful way. They'll ask better questions of the things they buy, use, and make, and discover how easy it is to use ideas from great designers to improve their everyday lives.

    Got to read an early draft of @berkun's new book, How Design Makes the World. Of all his books, it's now probably my favorite. (Though, there will always be warm places in my heart for Myths of Innovation and his great public speaking book.) Can't wait to get my official copy. https://t.co/ayAoHhYeWn

  • The Effective Manager is a hands-on practical guide to great management at every level. Written by the man behind Manager Tools, the world's number-one business podcast, this book distills the author's 25 years of management training expertise into clear, actionable steps to start taking today.

    The second framework comes from Mark Horstman’s (@mahorstman) The Effective Manager. https://t.co/glrAMCIQ0U His trinity of Feedback, One on Ones, and Coaching (with the addition of Delegating) is a great way to ensure direct reports are as effective as possible.

  • The greatest managers in the world seem to have little in common. They differ in sex, age, and race. They employ vastly different styles and focus on different goals. Yet despite their differences, great managers share one common trait: They do not hesitate to break virtually every rule held sacred by conventional wisdom. They do not believe that, with enough training, a person can achieve anything he sets his mind to. They do not try to help people overcome their weaknesses. They consistently disregard the golden rule. This amazing book explains why. Gallup presents the remarkable findings of its massive in-depth study of great managers across a wide variety of situations. Some were in leadership positions. Others were front-line supervisors. Some were in Fortune 500 companies; others were key players in small entrepreneurial companies. Whatever their situations, the managers who ultimately became the focus of Gallup's research were invariably those who excelled at turning each employee's talent into performance. There are vital performance and career lessons here for managers at every level, and, best of all, the book shows you how to apply them to your own situation.

    The first framework is from Gallup and was written up in their great book: First, Break All The Rules. https://t.co/w54in9zCyH It’s the Q12 employee engagement measures. Each question makes it simple for a manager to identify where they need to improve. https://t.co/A9L8Yx2NHp

  • Speaking to the HCI community and other design professionals, this work is grounded in both practice and scientific research. It encourages designers to try new methods, test themselves with the exercises and projects, and see an improvement in innovative interaction design that works.

    @MSGuzy @wasbuxton’s Sketching User Experiences is the go to resource on this topic. https://t.co/Yt8tqNLRmO

  • From a coral reef teeming with life to the instant success of YouTube, the author explores what kind of environment fosters the development of good ideas, identifying the seven key principles for generating great notions. By the author of Everything Bad Is Good for You.

    @scottjenson BTW, if you’ve never read Stephen Johnson’s book on the topic, I highly recommend it. I particularly like the notion of adjacent possibles to explain why multiple ideas arrive simultaneously. Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation https://t.co/Gls2skSlE0

  • Ruined by Design

    Mike Monteiro

    The world is working exactly as designed. The combustion engine which is destroying our planet's atmosphere and rapidly making it inhospitable is working exactly as we designed it. Guns, which lead to so much death, work exactly as they're designed to work. And every time we "improve" their design, they get better at killing. Facebook's privacy settings, which have outed gay teens to their conservative parents, are working exactly as designed. Their "real names" initiative, which makes it easier for stalkers to re-find their victims, is working exactly as designed. Twitter's toxicity and lack of civil discourse is working exactly as it's designed to work.The world is working exactly as designed. And it's not working very well. Which means we need to do a better job of designing it. Design is a craft with an amazing amount of power. The power to choose. The power to influence. As designers, we need to see ourselves as gatekeepers of what we are bringing into the world, and what we choose not to bring into the world. Design is a craft with responsibility. The responsibility to help create a better world for all. Design is also a craft with a lot of blood on its hands. Every cigarette ad is on us. Every gun is on us. Every ballot that a voter cannot understand is on us. Every time social network's interface allows a stalker to find their victim, that's on us. The monsters we unleash into the world will carry your name. This book will make you see that design is a political act. What we choose to design is a political act. Who we choose to work for is a political act. Who we choose to work with is a political act. And, most importantly, the people we've excluded from these decisions is the biggest (and stupidest) political act we've made as a society.If you're a designer, this book might make you angry. It should make you angry. But it will also give you the tools you need to make better decisions. You will learn how to evaluate the potential benefits and harm of what you're working on. You'll learn how to present your concerns. You'll learn the importance of building and working with diverse teams who can approach problems from multiple points-of-view. You'll learn how to make a case using data and good storytelling. You'll learn to say NO in a way that'll make people listen. But mostly, this book will fill you with the confidence to do the job the way you always wanted to be able to do it. This book will help you understand your responsibilities.

    Hey, @StarFire2258. Just so you know, @monteiro’s book, Ruined By Design, is excellent. I think it’s mandatory reading for everyone who works in tech.

  • Design for the Real World has, since its first appearance twenty-five years ago, become a classic. Translated into twenty-three languages, it is one of the world's most widely read books on design. In this edition, Victor Papanek examines the attempts by designers to combat the tawdry, the unsafe, the frivolous, the useless product, once again providing a blueprint for sensible, responsible design in this world which is deficient in resources and energy.

    “There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them.” — Victor Papanek https://t.co/5wqojNWdQu

  • Game Thinking

    Amy Jo Kim

    During her time working on genre-defining games like The Sims, Rock Band, and Ultima Online, Amy Jo learned that customers stick with products that help them get better at something they care about, like playing an instrument or leading a team. Amy Jo has used her insights from gaming to help hundreds of companies like Netflix, Disney, The New York Times, Ubisoft and Happify innovate faster and smarter, and drive long-term engagement.

    I think @amyjokim’s Game Thinking framework is a perfect way to design for the user’s duration with the product or service. https://t.co/v8saJuyfx6 https://t.co/h1ee3s2cRF

  • Conversations are a large part of how we work together as a team. Designers are no different, but there are not many resources available that concentrate on these necessary soft-skills. This book provides practical and actionable insights to help your team give and receive constructive criticism. For managers, this book discusses proven tools to set a foundation for your team to stay focused on overall goals, and how to handle negative critiques. As an added bonus, the book also includes a Critique Cheat Sheet so you can quickly reference strategies and tools from top industry experts.

    @mgoldst Excellent resource, @mgoldst. We’ll definitely be sharing it with our @CenterCentre students. (One resource you could add to your great list: https://t.co/UFnCFPFBnz)

  • Conversations are a large part of how we work together as a team. Designers are no different, but there are not many resources available that concentrate on these necessary soft-skills. This book provides practical and actionable insights to help your team give and receive constructive criticism. For managers, this book discusses proven tools to set a foundation for your team to stay focused on overall goals, and how to handle negative critiques. As an added bonus, the book also includes a Critique Cheat Sheet so you can quickly reference strategies and tools from top industry experts.

    @mattBernius Have you checked out @adamconnor and @aaroni’s Discussing Design? I think it might fit what you’re seeking. https://t.co/UFnCFPFBnz

  • @austingovella @jessicaivins @CenterCentre Yes, we have two courses in the @CenterCentre curriculum that are relevant: Communicating Design, based on @brownorama’s book of the same title. Information Design, which covers data visualization and gets into many Tuftian concepts.

  • Whether you’re designing consumer electronics, medical devices, enterprise Web apps, or new ways to check out at the supermarket, today’s digitally-enabled products and services provide both great opportunities to deliver compelling user experiences and great risks of driving your customers crazy with complicated, confusing technology. Designing successful products and services in the digital age requires a multi-disciplinary team with expertise in interaction design, visual design, industrial design, and other disciplines. It also takes the ability to come up with the big ideas that make a desirable product or service, as well as the skill and perseverance to execute on the thousand small ideas that get your design into the hands of users. It requires expertise in project management, user research, and consensus-building. This comprehensive, full-color volume addresses all of these and more with detailed how-to information, real-life examples, and exercises. Topics include assembling a design team, planning and conducting user research, analyzing your data and turning it into personas, using scenarios to drive requirements definition and design, collaborating in design meetings, evaluating and iterating your design, and documenting finished design in a way that works for engineers and stakeholders alike.

    @sovsetog I recommend looking at Goal-Directed Design in Kim Goodwin’s book and Indy Young’s Mental Models as great starting points. Both use a much richer research process to ensure that outcomes are chosen effectively.

  • @sovsetog I recommend looking at Goal-Directed Design in Kim Goodwin’s book and Indy Young’s Mental Models as great starting points. Both use a much richer research process to ensure that outcomes are chosen effectively.