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.
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.
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