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.”

If those of us in the innovation game are struggling with number fetishism, that is saying quite a lot. User and design research is about human cognition and emotion, pretty squishy topics really.  And design, which is generally carried out in the service of business, is an applied field.  What business person has the time to wrestle with taking the uncertainty factor below a certain threshold of instinctive confidence?  (The genius of Nielsen’s discount usability method was in demonstrating that closing in on the uncertainty factor has a long, expensive tail as it approaches zero – which, of course, it never does.  n=3 represents a lot of bang for the buck, and n=2000 a lot less so.) Why, then, are we so persuaded by numeric evidence?

Unlike the output from qualitative research studies, usually called insights, numbers have a primordial pull on us.  They are more valuable entities in social exchange, a fact which our lizard brains are fully aware of.  Numbers can be transmitted with less nuance, that is to say, less noise, and are therefore choice currency.   Seife provides evidence that human beings are capable of reacting to numbers from somewhere biologically deep, processing them somewhere in the muscles and tissue and nerves but not necessarily with the intellect.  “No matter how idiotic, how unbelievable an idea is, numbers can give it credibility.” (p.8)  He cites an example of MSNBC host Deborah Norville reporting with a straight face that 58% of all exercise done in America is broadcast on television.  3.5 billion situps were done in 2003, she reported.  Two million and 300,000 of those on exercise shows.  “The numbers had short-circuited Norville’s brain,” Siefe notes, “rendering her completely incapable of critical thought.”

Our lust for numbers is like our lust for sweet and fatty foods. Two million years of evolution have taught us to crave them.  But in the modern world, where they are not only in abundance, but easily manipulated and processed with the explicit goal of satiating us, they are dangerous.   The author lays out, in clear language, the heart of his epistemic argument.  Once a number tries to describe the real world, or “acquires a unit” in Seife’s language, it loses its purity.   There is always a measurement bias of one sort or another and therefore it can no longer inhabit the “platonic realm of absolute truth.”(p.10) He writes this without apologizing for it or acknowledging its provocativeness. But this is no mainstream view. This is a rejection of the very idea of structure or universal truth, a return to the Dionysian notion that the sublime lies in closeness of experience and not in critical distance. This is the sort of postmodern thinking that was radical in intellectual circles as recently as the 1960s.  This is Piaget.  This is Derrida.  And maybe because of that inaccessibility, this sort of thinking is still far from being absorbed into the fabric of our daily thoughts and culture in business life.

Enter proofiness.  A great term, a self-descriptive masterpiece of nomenclature. Its dubious etymological structure (with its comic closeness to being a real word, a science word) carries its actual semantic argument.  Of course, the author, Charles Seife, had some help in this.  The word is a clear homage to television comic, Stephen Colbert’s, famous neologism “truthiness.”  But it is Seife who brings it to the concept of proof, not truth.  Truthiness, which applies to information that has the patina of truth, is pure social criticism.  Proofiness, which also applies to information that has the patina of truth, is an attack on status quo views of ontological reality.  Truthiness, like the Bushism ‘strategery,’is aimed at easy targets and misanthropes- liars, manipulators, unilateralists, oversimplifiers.  Proofiness is aimed at all of us with the instinct to prove, and therefore at the natural condition of mankind itself.  “Proofiness has power over us because we’re blind to this impurity (of numbers).  Numbers, charts, graphs all have an aura of perfection.”  Seife’s argument, in short, is the more important one.

The book’s tagline, “The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception,” implies that the book is about a sort of numeric version of truthiness, some sort of number trickery done with intent to mislead.  In fact, the description of various mathematical anti-patterns ends by about page 40.  These are interesting in their own right.  Potempkin numbers are those which are built out of data that only looks like real data, data based on nonsensical or made-up measurements, such as IQ or the crowd estimates taken at free outdoor concerts.   Disestimation is the act of taking numbers more literally than the uncertainty surrounding them would seem to warrant.  (Seife’s example is the museum docent who dates the brontosaurus bones to 65,000,038 years. What’s the point of including the final 38 years when the error margin on such an estimate is likely in the tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years?)  By page 26, we’re on to fruit-packing and cherry-picking, which refers to the act of ignoring or obscuring the data that fails to support a hypothesis or argument.  The book is already drifting away from mathematics and is onto basic research ethics with 275 pages to go.

Despite the fact that there are the usual warnings here about the pitfalls of overlooking co-variants and making specious correlations that one would see in any tome on statistics, the book isn’t about math.  It’s about numbers. And to Seife, numbers represent powerful disinformation, unfairly persuasive rhetoric.   There is very little statistical depth or discussion of mathematical techniques in this book, other than to say, what is the point of doing statistical slicing and dicing on something that is fictional to begin with?  When Seife explains the concept of margin of error in political polling, which uses statistical formulas to harness some pretty nifty laws of nature in order to determine the amount of random weirdness likely to be in any sample, he doesn’t criticize the math, or even accuse the journalists who cite the polls of being innumerate.  He is more offended by those who accept the mathematical veracity in such a way that they don’t question basic systematic errors in the logic behind the poll’s construction and execution, such as who was sampled or what were they asked and in what way?(p.102)

Particularly revealing of Seife’s lack of concern with actual number manipulation is in his principle of causuistry.  “Casuistry – without the extra ‘u’ – is the art of making a misleading argument through seemingly sound principles.  Causuistry is a specialized form of casuistry where the fault in the argument comes from implying that there is a causal relationship between two things when in fact there isn’t such a linkage.”  He breaks this out as a separate idea from the statistical concept of regression analysis, used to prove causation between multiple independently correlated values. When Seife accuses someone of causuistry he isn’t concerned by the bad math on display, he’s offended by the sheer nerve that someone would try and build an argument out of it.

This gets back to my opening statement.  If the book is to make a lasting contribution outside of journalism or civics (Seife teaches journalism and the book is unfortunately heavy-handed with examples about electoral polling, elections, law and politics.  There are virtually no examples from the world of business or private life), it will require people to start taking this proofiness thesis to heart.  The concept instantly resonated with me.  Numbers, the coldest, hardest facts of all, are twisted and manipulated in order to add an air of proof to some act of data collection.   This touches right to the core of what are the least obvious but most insidious sources of user research failures: those that are related to epistemological hubris and the act of using research to validate ideas rather than to enrich them.

Where research fails most often is when the intent of it is misused.   The more you know about research methodologies, the more aware you are of their inevitable flaws.  The bad researchers are invariably the objectivists, the ones who arrogantly presume to be reporting on reality.   It is in this spirit of hubris that virtually all unforgivable research mistakes are made.     For instance, if you have just conducted a survey and concluded that 85% of potential customers liked your idea for an online information website, I will tell you that you have probably wasted your time.   Most likely your survey was flawed, your sample was flawed, or you created some other sort of systematic error and you cannot make that claim.   You have committed an act of proofiness.   And in the meantime, instead of using that opportunity to talk to your customers to learn something that might enrich your idea (which you always knew you were going to do anyways), you have squandered it trying to convince yourself and others that the idea is less risky than it probably is.   Concentrate on delivering insights, not validation.

Once, I worked as a usability researcher for two arch competitors in the same retailer category at roughly the same time.  Their contrasting styles will always stick with me.  One had a usability manager that emphasized insights.  The other had an old school HCI guy that emphasized Truth (capital T is no accident here) and experimental control.   When interviewing for the first client, I would tell the participant that I didn’t know where this interview was going but I was interested in partnering with them to try and understand what it is like to use this website, how it fits into their life, and how it could be improved.  When interviewing for the second client, I would give the participant a pre-filled out card with a task on it and watch them try and complete the task while somebody from the retailer’s staff timed them in the back room.    I barely opened my mouth for the second client, lest I contaminate the experimental conditions.    The first client had a progressive stance about the research, understood its limitations and was focused on collecting inspiration to refine their design in ways that might resonate with its customer base.  The second client wanted validation only for its existing “agreed upon” design, and set up a priori experimental conditions to get at it.   It is worth noting that for reasons unrelated to this particular usability study, the second client unexpectedly and spectacularly went out of business several years later.  The first one is thriving.   I think it goes to show that proofiness never prospers.

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:

• There are not many design or UX books available on audiobook, which sucks.  That category would be far more populated otherwise.
• My work in science UI this year, particularly chemistry, was an obsession. My reading list shows that.
• I didn’t list my abandoned books here, but they were all fiction.   I only got through 4 works of fiction, 2 of which were extremely short.  I just don’t have much patience for it these days.  The one novel I did inhale was Jonathon Lethem’s Chronic City – which I loved.
• I rely on Audible.com’s sales quite a bit, so my list has some stinkers on it because of that fact.  Just not everything  I really want to read is affordable.
• My favorite book of the year was the Selfish Gene.  It totally changed my understanding of the world and evolution, and is a masterpiece of science writing.  My favorite last year was Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate, and it is clear to me that Dawkins and Pinker are a cut above everybody else in terms of lucid thinking and clear writing style.
• My least favorite book of the year was probably “One Second After” – a post-apocalyptic novel about an ElectroMagnetic Pulse attack on the US.  I should have known I would hate it when I saw that the forward was written by Newt Gingrich.  It’s full of paranoid spirit, gun toting bravado, and a deep sense of American exceptionalism.     It makes it clear that exactly the kind of narrow minds that persecuted Oppenheimer during the “red scare” of the 1950s are still a force in American life.
• I also read endless and overlapping books on innovation and business, some of which were pretty lame.    Avoid the Power of Pull, Changing the Game, Wired to Care,  How Pleasure Works, The Pursuit of Perfect and Drive.   They’re all trying to do the Gladwell thing, and none of them really needed to be written.
• The most mind-blowing books of my year were Biocentrism and the Ego Tunnel, which both make a convincing case that the universe and everything in it is generated by our own perception.
• My other favorites were Good to Great by Jim Collins, a book I’ve quoted almost as much as I did the 4-hour Work Week last year, and Talent is Overrated, which instilled the idea of deliberate practice in me.

Science & Technology

MUST READ: The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins

American Prometheus: The Triumph & Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird & Martin Shirwood

The Science of Formula One Design, by David Tremayne

Proofiness, The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception by Charles Siefe

Don’t be Such a Scientist, by Randy Olson

The Myth of Alzheimers, by Peter J. Whitehouse

MUST READ:  Biocentrism, by Richard Lanza

101 Theory Drive, by Terri McDermott

Endless Forms Most Beautiful, by Sean B. Carroll

The Demon Under the Microscope, by Thomas Hager

Science Matters, by James Trefil, Robert M. Hazen

A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson

The Ego Tunnel, by Thomas Metzinger

The Brain that Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge

Particle Physics: a Very Short Introduction, by Frank Close

History, Philosophy & Social Science

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Freidrich Neitzsche

MUST READ: The Philosophy of Freidrich Neitzsche, by H.L. Mencken

Man’s Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankl

Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

Intellectuals, by Paul Johnson

The Moral Landscape, by Sam Harris

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, by John McWhorter

The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright

Design, Interaction Design, & Information Science

Box, Bottle, Bag: The World’s Best Packaging Design, by Andrew Gibbs

Information, by Luciano Floridi

Prototyping, by Todd Ziki Warfel

Undercover UX, by Cennydd Boyles & James Boxx

Cognitive Surplus, by Clay Shirky

Business & Innovation

MUST READ: Good to Great, by Jim Collins

Bloomberg by Bloomberg, by Michael Bloomberg

MUST READ: The Death of Capital, by Michael E. Lewitt

Too Big to Fail, by Andrew Ross Sorkin

Brand it Yourself, by Lynn Altmann

Rework, by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson

Tribes, by Seth Godin

The Numerati, by Stephen Baker

Where Good Ideas Come From, by Steven Johnson

The Power of Pull, by John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison

MUST READ: Talent is Overrated, by Geoff Colvin

Wired to Care, by Dev Patnaik

Changing the Game, by David Edery & Ethan Mollick

Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, by Daniel Pink

Fiction

Animal Farm, by George Orwell

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

Chronic City, by Jonathon Lethem

One Second After, by William R. Forstchen

The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson (re-read)

Psychology

The Pursuit of Perfect, by Tal Ben-Shahar

50 Self Help Classics, by Tom Butler-Bowden

The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt

Breakfast with Socrates, by Robert Rowland Smith

Mindfulness, by Ellen J. Langer

How Pleasure Works, by Paul Bloom

Miscellaneous Nonfiction

The Know it All, by A.J. Jacobs

MUST READ: In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan

The Ominvore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

Second Nature, by Michael Pollan

Anti-cancer, by David Servan-Shreiber

The Rolling Stones: Exile on Main Street (33 & 1/3)  by Bill Janovitch

MUST READ: Adventures on the Wine Route, by Kermit Lynch

Open: An Autobiography by Andre Aggassi

Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein

The First Key to Success – Counting to One

Like design, branding involves creating an illusion of clarity out of that which is fundamentally indeterminate.   Whether you are publishing a blog or building iPhone apps, you are looking for a singular, but simple and strong, idea at the center.  Or to put it Altman’s terms, you should learn to count to one.   “We don’t buy a shampoo that doubles as a face wash and a hand soap,” she writes.  Consumers want to believe, whether it is true or not, that “certain brands and certain products perform best at certain tasks.”   Domino’s Pizza built their mega-brand on a single promise – delivery in under 30 minutes.  There was no mention of whether the pizza was also delicious.  Less successfully, Advil tried to position their product to the marketplace with two core benefits. Fast. Strong. Advil. “Do you remember that campaign?” Altman asks.  “Of course you don’t.  Neither does anyone else.”

Practicing this sort of reductionism is harder than it sounds.  Odds are that your product or website does more than one thing well, or at least that you want it to.  For instance, if you think your express passport service is both easy and fast, you will be hard-pressed to give up one of those benefits.  You may make the mistake of naming your service ABC Passport Express as a result.  “ABC” connotes easiness and guarantees good phone book placement (a valuable business benefit before Google came along in 1997), and “express” sounds fast.  Good, right?  No, in fact, because you will probably  lose out to your more focused competition, RushMyPassport.com, who commits to the single benefit of fast turnaround.  Being perceived as having one clear benefit usually wins the battle for the prospect’s mind – which is all that matters.

The name, "ABC Passport Express," simultaneously promises ease and speed of service, not to mention the benefits of being local area specialists as captured in their tagline. The result is generic.

RushMyPassport.com focuses on one core promise, speed of turnaround time, and creates a coordinated impression that this is what they do - get you your passport fast.

The Second Key to Success – Work Fast and Loose (at least at the beginning)

Ok. So now you can count to one, but how do you arrive at the right one? The most sure-fire way is to start with the many.  Ideas are cheap, so you should generate lots of them, and you should do it fast.   The design firm IDEO, more famous for their brainstorming methods than any other design firm in history, once re-designed that most familiar and time-tested of objects, the supermarket shopping cart, in only 5 days.   “Maybe we should acknowledge it’s kind of insane to do an entire project in just a week,” said Peter Skillman of IDEO, as their team proceeded to do exactly that – on national television!   The project was done in response to a challenge set forth by the producer’s of ABC’s television news magazine, Nightline, in 1999. One of IDEO’s key premises is to throw lots and lots of ideas out in the early phases – then cull them down to the key ideas later. In The Art of Innovation, Tom Kelley shares the IDEO brainstorming rules which are written on the wall during brainstorming sessions there. Go for Quantity. Encourage Wild Ideas. Be Visual. And always, always – work fast and loose in the early stages, because winning ideas will get refined in the later stages.  And, guess what? Winning ideas can come from anywhere, so generate lots of them!

And if we return to the Brandmaker Express method that Altman writes about in her book, we will find an approach for generating names and taglines that is very much in the spirit of IDEO.   For each naming challenge, Altman and her team design a set of creative workshop exercises to generate lots and lots of ideas.   The workshops are run twice, once with the employees and internal stakeholders at the client company, and once with a team of ‘creative souls’ (an eclectic group of creative professionals who do this as a moonlighting gig.)  The workshop games are developed on a custom basis for each product being named, but there are a few favorites which appear over and over.  For instance, to generate tagline ideas there is usually an exercise to write an attention-grabbing headline like you might find in a famous publication, but the publication that serves as a setting is varied based on the tone of the product (e.g. NY Daily News for “sensational” headlines, NY Times for straightforward and sophisticated.)  Then she might add another exercise to push the creativity further, such as “Now in Three Words,” where the headline has to be compressed to it’s 3-word essence.  There are also specific exercises for arriving at names, such as “Word Smash,” which involves taking two English words that fit the concept and shoving them together to make a nonsense word – like Celebrex or MaxiPro. The point with these games is to do lots of them, coming at your naming challenge from several angles.  As you are doing the exercises, you should be furiously writing down the things that your brainstormers are saying in response to the challenge.

The Third Key to Success – Synthesize the ideas into a few powerful concepts, then visualize them

My favorite part of working with Altman is when the professional graphic designer she hires comes back with about 20 full-color 10 by 14 print-style ads with names, taglines, and corresponding imagery.  This is where the ideas from the brainstorming are synthesized and come to life, and this is also the appropriate time to critique the ideas and vote on them as a group.  The book has many insights on how to get to the right 20.  For instance, find out the dealbreakers early.  Maybe your CEO hates purple so there is no use in developing the purple people eater concept that someone threw out in one of the brainstorming exercises.  Concision is essential.   You should develop taglines that could tell the story of the site (along with a name and a logo) if everything else on the page was removed.  And she provides several known pitfalls that lead to writing bad, consumer alienating taglines.  Rampant use of the gerund, e.g. using a verb with no subject and adding “ing” to the end, as in Nokia’s “connecting people,” is a big no-no.   Altman calls this kind of tone “self-congratulatory, self-praising, and seriously superior.”  She also likes second person taglines, not first person.  Telling your customer what you are trying to do in a first person tagline is not the point (e.g. Lucent’s “creating value through true convergence.”)   Second person taglines, like “you deserve a break today,” bring the customer into the brand’s narrative.

Lynn Altman uses print-style ads, along the lines of this one for monster.com, to present name and tagline concepts.

So by now, I hope you’re convinced that it’s time to think like a marketer, not a business development person or -god forbid- a designer, when you are naming and positioning websites.  Don Norman, in a recent interview in upstart UX magazine, Want, said outright that the distinction between designers and marketers is really very small.  They both ask the same question, “How do we make it so that people will enjoy the product?”  And if you are wondering who is more creative – marketers of designers? – you should sit in on one of Brand Now’s creatives-only brainstorming sessions and you will realize that we are indeed talking about two sides of the same coin.

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.

2. Designing Web Interfaces

by Bill Scott & Theresa Neil

This book was published by an arch competitor earlier this year, but I just can’t say enough about its value.  Most amazing to me is how I pick this up infinitely more than its predecessor – Designing Interfaces.   Why?  Well, basically because of it’s emphasis on rich interaction on the web.  This book has taken what used to be considered “nice to have” techniques associated with the likes of Flash, Ajax, and fancy Javascript and proven why moving beyond the ‘page’ and ‘form’ as the only building blocks of design will be the future of the usable web interface.  What’s more, the book is a practical guide to designing and specifying such rich  interactions as drag-and-drop, in page editing, progressive disclosure, and tons more.   These techniques are still not mainstream, and your average IA still seems to shy away from putting rich interactions into their wireframes (perhaps long conditioned to getting too much pushback from programmers about using the fancy stuff), but this book demystifies and categorizes the techniques, and provides plenty of context about why they work as well as the risks of using them.  Bill Scott works at Netflix, a true pioneer in rich but usable web UI.   This book is invaluable for the UX professional who is trying to push their organization’s web interfaces to the next level.

3. Observing the User Experience

by Mike Kuniavsky

Now on my third copy of this, you’d think I’d have learned my lesson not to loan it out anymore – but it’s just so damn useful!    I used to be a commercial usability consultant, so I wasn’t expecting to use this book nearly as much as I do.  But an in-house Director of User Experience has to do a lot of improvising when it comes to reaching out to users.   For instance, I’m largely a qualitative guy but I find I have to write and review a lot of survey instruments all of the sudden.  Where do I turn? Kuniavsky.  If I have to create a comparative grid of competitor sites and their features, where do I turn to make sure I’m doing something valid and useful? Kuniavsky.  If someone is running a focus group and wants a few pointers on moderating or recruiting? You guessed it. Kuniavsky.  Card sorts?  Ok. You get it by now.   The fact is, I do a lot of DIY studies now, and even more often, I’m in the position of advising others on how to do their own user research.  This is where having a book like Kuniavsky’s really comes in handy – all the basics are in there in a form that’s easy to communicate to others.

4. Web Analytics: An Hour a Day

by Avinash Kaushik

Here’s one major difference between being a user experience professional who works at an agency or consultancy versus one who works at a company – you are still around after the site is designed, programmed, and launched.   It won’t take long before you develop a keen interest in web analytics.   The most holistic and sensible voice in modern web analytics is indisputably Avinash Kaushik – who advocates cutting through the crap and paying attention to what matters.   The Pre-Avinash universe was one in which websites were managed by looking at whatever reams of traffic data the monitoring tools were capable of spitting out, without being able to answer even the most basic questions about who was visiting the site and whether they were having a good experience or not.   What’s even better is his success at breaking analytics out of it’s marketing silo and incorporating user experience values (not to mention, common sense)  into the field.   This book has directly influenced an initiative at Wiley to manage websites and improve them incrementally – constantly adapting to the changing marketplace – rather than relying on a cycle of periodic redesigns.   The new version Web Analytics 2.0 is due out soon, and I can’t wait.

5. The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

by Al Ries & Jack Trout

This one’s a bit of an outlier, given my theme, but a large part of my role is talking people out of ideas for new websites and features.   I probably add as much value if not more for what I advise not to do online than what I do in shaping what gets done.  This book clearly lays out conventional marketing thinking and makes it clear why companies make the same mistakes over and over.    While the book isn’t written with websites in mind, every principle is just as applicable to what we do online as it is for other types of product marketing.  Sample law:  The Law of Leadership teaches you that it is better to be first in a new category than to try to enter or dramtically improve your position in an existing category.   The book also teaches that working hard and delivering quality solutions is important – but not nearly as important as working smart and winning the battle of the prospect’s perception.   The best UX people contain shrewd marketing minds and no other book gets you ramped up faster than this one.