Posts Tagged book reviews
Proofiness and User Research, A Book Review
Posted by Todd Toler in Reviews, User & Design Research on January 14th, 2011
Proofiness is the mathematical version of "truthiness." It lurks in business, politics, media, and yes - user research.
If Charles Seife’s Proofiness has a lasting contribution to offer those in the fields of user experience, design, or even business, it will be in the elegant branding of its own subjectivist epistemology. This, in itself, is no small victory. It involves taking a complex debate on the origin of knowledge and in a single catchy word, turning it into a meme. Picture a future where somebody whips out a clever piece of marketing research in a design or business meeting, something with lots of correlations and a confident sounding sample. Maybe there is a scientific looking visualization, like a scatterplot diagram with one of those Jackson Pollack splatters of microscopic pinpoints, something that screams data was collected here. Its presenter starts speaking with the cajoling air of someone trying to impress the truth, with a capital ‘T,’ upon their audience. And then suddenly, the attendees stand in protest and accuse their tormenter, in unison, of proofiness.
Then try to grasp what a profound departure that is from today’s climate of info digestion, where almost nothing is spit back if it smells and tastes like it was cooked up from numbers. Jakob Nielsen, the founding father of pragmatism in HCI research, has condemned number fetishism in our field periodically since he came to prominence in the early 1990s – most exasperatingly in this 2004 post, The Risk of Quantitative Studies. He writes, “…most statistical research is less credible than qualitative studies. Design research is not like medical science.” In a 2009 post, five years later, little has changed. He writes, “People still pay far more attention to questionable quantitative studies than they do to simpler qualitative studies that have much greater validity.”
My Reading List in 2010
Posted by Todd Toler in Reviews on December 30th, 2010
Well, this was definitely the most prolific year of book reading in my life – 61 books. Many of these were audio books, which a surprising amount of people challenge me about, as if it is not the same as reading. But as a heavy listener, I have learned to concentrate quite well while being read to through my iPhone headphones. I think it’s an acquired skill, because last year I retained a lot less and spaced out a lot when listening to audiobooks. Now I rarely do. I listen around 3 hours a day now because of my commute, dog-walking, and exercise regimens. I also turned back to reading print books again this year, more than ever, since going on a “low information diet” on all things other than books. No more newspapers or magazines this year and way fewer podcasts and blog posts were consumed. A couple of insights when reading over the list:
How to Name Your Website and Write A Tagline like a Pro
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Reviews, UX-Driven Company on May 24th, 2010
I am a reluctant brander. Like most User Experience designers, I like to think of myself as a high-minded design thinker – not a marketer. You know the arguments. Designers think about solving real human problems and obsess on the essence of something’s purpose. Marketers define essence as that which gets noticed and remembered. Designers are empathically creative. Marketers are exploitatively creative. Designers seek timeless truths. Marketers are trend-chasers. Designers live in Brooklyn and sell artisanal pickles between freelance gigs. Marketers live in Manhattan and coin phrases like FroYo. Yet it didn’t take me long working in this field to realize that making such distinctions is wrong-headed. If anything, I relate more to the marketer these days. Marketers trend towards the pragmatic. Designers? At their worst: ideologues, aesthetes, navel-gazers. Design and marketing ultimately chase the same goal, “marketplace magic,” so why not think like a good branding brain in order to name and position your digital business? At a minimum you should know a little about the work of Lynn Altman before you set about trying to name your site and write a tagline for it. Her firm, BrandNow, and her book, Brand it Yourself, are excellent starting points for demystifying the creative process behind successful product branding.
5 Must-have Books for a Director of User Experience
Posted by Todd Toler in UX-Driven Company on September 24th, 2009
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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