As a client-side Director of User Experience, my job is quite varied.    The amount of web development that’s happening in a company of our size is truly staggering – so my role is as much one of providing continuity and thought leadership as it is directly designing or managing designers.   The difficult parts of my job are a) giving people in the business the practical tools and methodologies to actually deliver on the promise of being “user centered,” b) finding language that achieves a common understanding of design ideas for a general audience, and c) pushing the expectations for what can be achieved online past the “status quo” state of incremental improvements and a  myopic focus on what the competition is doing.  These 5 books have been the most influential in providing guidance for my daily challenges:

1. Serious Play

by Michael Schrage

This is a slim book and a quick read – but it’s number one on my list.  In fact, it virtually provides me with a grand unifying theory of implementing a UX culture at a large company.  My mantra at Wiley is “always put a design deliverable in front of the specification and have it tested in a valid way.”    By ‘design deliverable,’ I mean model, or prototype, of the end product -something vivid enough for a potential user of the product to actually imagine the experience of using it.   Schrage persuasively explains the value to any organization of becoming a “modeling culture,”  one in which every conversation happens around real designs and not in the abstract language of marketing and business plans.  If you are in a highly design sensitive environment (I’m imagining Apple, but I don’t really know), maybe your company already is a modeling culture, but most large corporations aren’t even close.   This book also conveys an important emphasis on experimentation and tolerance of failure at the institutional level.  A Director of User Experience should buy multiple copies of this and give them out to business leaders in their company as holiday gifts.

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