Reviewing 4 Popular Design Books: Part 4
My reviews and short takeaways of some of the most popular books about UX design & understanding the people we design for.
The Books: 100 Things by Susan M. Weinschennk, Ph.D. Mismatch by Kate Holmes, Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden, and User Friendly by Robert Fabricant & Cliff Kuang.
This will give you short descriptions of each book, with my thoughts on them as well as 3 key things I think are the best learnings. I hope this will inspire you to pick up these books too!
100 Things
Every designer need to know about people
By Susan M. Weinschennk, Ph.D.
I read the physical verison (there is no audio version)
Why do people behave as they do?
Get the core understanding of people’s behavior, needs, and what makes us tick: Explained for Designers. This book will give you a basic overview of design & user psychology that you need to understand people that will use the products you design. With great summaries and details on how you should use psychological methods for design, you will have plenty of tips and tricks to make your designs better!
The book is divided into the topics of how people: see, read, remember, feel, decide, think, make mistakes focus their attention, what motivates us, and social factors. This book does not have any drawn-out inspiring stories about developers and how they solved specific design problems in a tough environment. Instead, this book gives you the information you need in a clear, concise way with great summaries, which makes this book very easy to read & get back to when you want to look up some details again.
If you are looking to start learning about design psychology but feeling overwhelmed… this book is a great place to start!
There’s also a second book to this one with 100 more things that you can read if you like this one and want to learn even more!
“People are very willing to click multiple times. In fact, they won’t even notice they’re clicking if they’re getting the right amount of information at each click to keep them going down the path. Think progressive disclosure; don’t count clicks.”
— Susan M Welchneck
My Thoughts
Clear structure, great content, practical advice, short & sweet info.
This is one of those books that EVERY designer should read, especially if you are just starting out. It gives the basics of all the important things you need to know about human behavior, how the brain works and why your design is good or bad.
I really like how concise and simple it is written. Since each piece of learning just covers 2–3 pages, you will read it quickly if you read a couple per day. I’ve heard these type of design tips being used wrong or misunderstood by others trying to do UX design work, so I think this book needs to be read by anyone that wants to start learning about UX design. A lot of small mistakes are made on all digital products, so this book would help many to clear up confusing details.
🔑 Key Learnings
- People make mistakes, design for it.
Everyone will make mistakes, not read the instructions, miss click, not understand and just every type of error we can make. We need to design a smooth and kind experience when this happens. DO NOT make mistakes hard to correct or make them feel stressed about it! - We can guide the user’s focus.
You can do this in many ways. Page layout and placements, using images, font sizes, colors, and much more. So make sure you design to guide the user right! - The brain loves patterns.
It’s how the brain is wired to work. This has helped us survive in the wild, build social groups, make the complex simple, and make quick decisions based on previous experiences. These things come into play for design as well!
Recommendations
- Design students
- (UX) Designers
- UI Designers/Artists
- Programmers/Coders
Lean UX
Designing Great Products with Agile Teams
By Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden
I listened to the audiobook version
Lean is the new UX
Are you stuck in a waterfall work structure, design documentation piles up into giant handoffs, you are the only one driving and user testing or looks at feedback? This book is for you who want to change all that!
Lean UX gives a great overview of the methods & concepts of working Lean in your design flow. Lean UX expands the role of the creative, to not only be on one singular person with UX in their title but for it to be ingrained in the team workflow so everyone gains insight and knowledge about the product & customers together.
Working Lean, and applying UX thinking into the core, benefits the business/product as well as everyone in the team. This step-by-step guide goes through WHY this is a new way forward in work for any type of business. Everyone can (should) think a bit leaner in their process.
With this book, you will feel more confident in the full workflow as a designer! It has multiple examples of real teams that have taken the journey through Lean UX. What goal they had, how they structured the iteration process to fit the product they were working on, how they used the insight they gain from different types of user testing. Unique struggles, as well as many aha moments, give you valuable insights for you to reflect on how you can apply this to your future projects too!
How do you work Lean in an Agile team? How does this work in Scrum workflow? They go through each one and gives you examples for each step and how you can get the best out of all the methods together.
They take UX design and bring it up to the whole team to collaborate using the core methods to find solutions together.
UX thinking is NOT just for the person with the UX or Design Title in their name.
“Generally, hypothesis statements use the format: We believe [this statement is true]. We will know we’re [right/wrong] when we see the following feedback from the market: [qualitative feedback] and/or [quantitative feedback] and/or [key performance indicator change].”
— Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden, Lean UX
My Thoughts
This is a great listen for anyone that wants to learn about team collaborations & how UX fit’s into that! I think it would also be good to read the physical book if you really want to dig into the details and refer back to them later if you are starting out with Lean UX work in your team.
I enjoyed the explanations of how Design work has evolved with new digital products and how this applies to our design work now as UX designers. He goes into great detail on the flow of Lean design, how it applies to your work, some examples of how you can use it, and WHY it works so well. I think this is the best book about understanding the Lean work process together with teams and how UX thinking is at the core of it.
I hope you are at a company that works Lean in some way, but if you are not, this book will give you great fundamentals to level up your company to be Leaner!
🔑 Key Learnings
- UX thinking and methods are for everyone in the team.
Not just the one with that title. This shift in thinking about UX is very important. UX has for a long time now been the “hipster-designer” that doesn’t feel very inclusive. We need to change the perception of it to make it a team effort. - Test small, often & have the full team be a part of the user feedback flow.
This is very important for Lean UX to really work in a team. It will be hard in the beginning because most people are not used to this but it will help everyone create better together! - Use sprints in Agile & Scrum to work for you as a Designer.
By blending the Lean UX system into classic teamwork flows your UX skills can benefit the team to see the benefits of UX design.
Recommendations
- Design Students
- UX designers
- Product owners/managers
Mismatch
How Inclution Shapes Design
By Kate Holmes
I listened to the audiobook version
We need to design for Everyone!
It’s time that we change the view on accessibility & inclusive design. It’s not for a small minority of people that are very different from us. The world is full of people with their own struggles & limitations that make them limited in how they interact & live in the world. (You, me, your family, friends, everyone!)
With many types of examples, Kate shows how our city landscape, homes, digital tools, and video games are not designed for all people. There’s a history of exclusive design thinking in society that we still live with.
When she mentions disabilities, she’s not referring to just a small percentage of people that have limitations that stay the same all their lives. We all go through levels & types of disabilities throughout our lives. We are small when we are children, we get hurt growing up, our eyesight will not be as it once was and our range of motion will decrease as we get older. We need to design for everyone to feel included and able to join the activities that many of us take for granted.
Myths we need to break:
- That there is a “normal” or ideal person/user. This goes into how we decide on writing and use our Personas for design that excludes diversity and temporary challenges in life.
- That the 80/20 rule is going to make our design fit 80% of our users.
- That “normal” people don’t need to adjust their surroundings or digital items to be able to use them effectively. Only edge cases need to do that.
- That accessibility & inclusive design is for edge cases of people. So most of our users don’t need it and that “normal” people don’t deviate from the standards.
“Disability is critical to any conversation about exclusion. It touches everyone’s life, eventually. Yet disability is commonly understood as applying to only a marginal percentage of the human population. This is simply untrue.”
— Kat Holmes, Mismatch
My Thoughts
This book is a must for any designer looking to level up their emotional understanding of how design is evolving and how to design more inclusive. I’ve seen that when accessibility is brought up, it’s still mostly referred to as something nice we should do for people with disabilities. But, as we see, this has made the progress slow and many companies (and designers) can still put it off as “something we can add later”. This book gives you a better perspective, where inclusive design IS the way forward. It’s NOT taking you away from doing “real design”. This IS UX design moving forward!
The way Kate explains the concepts in this book makes it obvious that we need to design for everyone!
This book has made me think differently on design and how we are often told to “design for the MVP first” and then we add some accessibility features later… when we have time (btw, there’s never enough time later). I already knew that we need to design for good UX from the start, but this expanded my view on WHO that means we are designing for.
So in short, this book is great and works really well as an audiobook!
How can we do better?
1. Empathy! We need to start looking around at the struggles other people have and put ourselves in those situations. This can be done by actually paying attention to our surroundings as well as talking to people that have these struggles and asking them how they want this to be designed better. Sometimes it’s an easy fix for design, we just haven’t seen it yet.
2. Educate yourself! On how to design with inclusion in mind. Read up on resources, watch videos and listen to people that face these struggles on a daily basis. There are a lot of passionate people out there with great content that will set you up to design with inclusion in mind from the start!
🔑 Key Learnings
- Being rejected is physically painful.
Yes really! Just imagine you being a child playing catch with 2 other children. But all of a sudden they stop throwing the ball to you and just continue playing amongst themselves, leaving you out. This is the deep hurting feeling of getting left out. This happens over and over in how we design our public spaces, gadgets in our homes, digital products, and video games. - Edge cases are not what you think.
Designing for people that are considered “edge cases” will benefit more groups of people that also find the design useful to them. Solutions for individuals that are for example; dead, blind, or have permanent limited use of their limbs, will also benefit people with temporary disabilities or that just prefer to use products in a certain way!
Example: Touch screens were first invented to solve an accessibility problem (phone buttons were hard to press), but now it’s the standard! - The future is to make technology flexible to everyone’s preference.
We have already seen a big jump with voice commands where you don’t need to use your hands on a display. This is used by a lot of people that find this more convenient for them, not only individuals that are dependant on this on a daily basis. There are lots more examples where innovation happened because someone designed for a specific problem for a considered small group of people. Technology was slow, stiff and WE needed to adapt to IT. But for the future, it needs to instead be flexible to human needs.
Recommendations
- All Designers
- Bosses / Managers
- Entrepenours
User Friendly
How the hidden rules of design are changing the way we live, work, and play.
By Cliff Kuang with Robert Fabricant
I listened to the audiobook version
The customer has finally become the user!
This book is in some ways a continuation of work from Don Norman with his books, as User Friendly takes the discussion to the next step. You will see a lot of mentions and references to Don Norman throughout this book and it is building on his design system, extending it to the digital market of new technologies and challenges that designers are now facing.
This book gives us a peek behind the curtain where we hear from the designers that are at the forefront of inventing new digital solutions. From the interesting problem of user trust when designing self-driving cars, how two students are looking to solve the public transportation problem in Africa, how to make a family trip truly magical, to the security problems that have recently plagued Facebook. This book takes us on an interesting journey to discover what we really mean will *User Friendly* in the new digital era. Are we designing for a digital utopia or are we making Black Mirror a reality? The authors of this book do have a bright vision of the future though, but there are problems in the future that we need to design for.
User Experience Design is no longer just about removing friction from mundane things, it’s about being able to solve problems that help the user in bigger ways. We need to put back the USER at the front of the design and take a step back from designing products that more and more easily separate people from their money.
Design should not be about what is easy to use. We can no longer assume that making a better world will automatically come from making people’s lives easier. We need to create the right things.
“Instead of offering more with less friction, they simply offer more”
— Cliff Kuang, User Friendly
My Thoughts
Very inspiring to listen to! This book is not as heavy with technical terms and methods as many other design books, so it works great as an audiobook. This will inspire you to look at your design on a bigger scale. It’s easy to get stuck in work that revolves around making people click buttons as easily as possible so they can spend money without being annoyed. But is that really what we want UX & Design to be about?
This book gave me a bigger mindset about the role of design. We need to use our design knowledge for the better to build the future of digital experiences that makes a difference. We can push for a better vision for user design & problem-solving. Yeah selecting the perfect color on buttons might be fun in an artistic way. But if we look up from all the details and business goals, we can see that there are more important things we create.
The book is still very positive to many large companies that have quite a questionable history when it comes to designing to make us spend more money & time on their products. But I still think there’s a lot of great learnings from this book that makes me recommend it to you.
🔑 Key Learnings
- Technology has matured.
Technology has reached a point where just designing things will not automatically make it useful or helpful to users. We need to put the USER back into the focus of the design. How we live, our struggles & goals. You can do more than making it easy for people to click buy. - We expect it all to be magical.
Design is now everywhere in our lives. We are not limited to a stationary computer, or even just our phones. Technology and the tools we use come with us everywhere we go. School, vacation, on the run. We expect everything to be a seamless, not noticeable & smart experience. - The history of design is rough.
UX design is still young in the eyes of many. Some industries are still just learning about design and UX thinking. But some companies use this knowledge to their benefit at the expense of people. UX design has been used to exploit people’s time, money, thoughts & political views, for too long.
Recommendations
- UX Designers
- Product Designers
💙 Thank You for Reading!
I hope you learned something interesting and found something you want to read yourself!
🐦 Follow me on Twitter for more UX Design & Video Game chats: https://twitter.com/ichianna
More Design Book Reviews in this series:
Part 3
