In the field of engineering like many others, foreign competitors are beating U.S. businesses to the punch in terms of bringing new products successfully to the marketplace. How can U.S. engineering companies compete? Simply by turning to this thought-provoking work which answers these and many other questions of successful design products and systems that are market driven and user oriented. Using a comprehensive methodological framework for human-centered design of complex systems, it covers four phases: naturalist, marketing, engineering, sales and service. A wide variety of tools and techniques are discussed within this framework, with illustrated case histories introduced early and developed throughout the chapters. This thorough and consistent framework for design, in combination with numerous ``how to'' tips, provides the reader with a self-contained, applications-oriented plan with which to pursue design concepts.
What makes a product successful? How it looks? The way it functions? Its ease of use? Or do factors like price and marketing dominate? In a quest to find answers to these questions, Deconstructing Product Design engages readers in a process of critically analyzing a diverse collection of 100 innovative products, from well-known classics to contemporary objects of desire. The goal is to support critical thinking about design, facilitate discovery of patterns of success (and failure) across products, and enable readers to apply lessons learned to their own design work. Experts from multiples design disciplines contribute commentary, including: Robert Blaich, industrial design; Jill Butler, graphic design; Alan Cooper, technology design; Brock Danner, architecture; Kimberly Elam, graphic design; Donald Emmite, design history; Larimie Garcia, graphic arts; Scott Henderson, product design; Kritina Holden, human factors; Robert Kingslyn, graphic design; Jon Kolko, interaction design; Lyle Sandler, experience design; Rob Tannen, human factors; Dori Tunstall, Design Anthropology, Steven Umbach, Product Design; Paula Wellings, interaction design. Continue the deconstruction at www.deconstructingproductdesign.com.
"Great teams are comprised of ordinary people that are empowered and inspired. They are empowered to solve hard problems in ways their customers love yet work for their business. They are inspired with ideas and techniques for quickly evaluating those ideas to discover solutions that work: they are valuable, usable, feasible and viable. This book is about the idea and reality of "achieving extraordinary results from ordinary people". Empowered is the companion to Inspired. It addresses the other half of the problem of building tech products?how to get the absolute best work from your product teams. However, the book's message applies much more broadly than just to product teams. Inspired was aimed at product managers. Empowered is aimed at all levels of technology-powered organizations: founders and CEO's, leaders of product, technology and design, and the countless product managers, product designers and engineers that comprise the teams. This book will not just inspire companies to empower their employees but will teach them how. This book will help readers achieve the benefits of truly empowered teams"--
For almost every sensationalized media report of product failure, a closer look often determines these failures occurred due to inadequate reliability theory and methodology. Current theories and practices cannot solve these problems, mainly because test specifications, especially lifetime tests, express their results as either pass or fail; these results thus provide little useful quantitative information. In a clear, concise presentation, Improving Reliability and Quality for Product Success discusses how to eradicate failures in hardware products and, consequently, achieve greater success in the marketplace. Evolved from the author’s more than thirty years of experience, the book redefines quality and reliability terminology, explains failure mechanics, and analyzes why reliability accidents occur in the products of established corporations. The author presents a new prevention methodology in easily understood qualitative and scientific terms. Without excess discussions of the complex related mathematics, he creates principles that enable readers to identify problems before product release into the market. These novel concepts and methodology can reduce product troubles by establishing test specifications that produce quantified outcomes that constitute conclusive judgment data. Many books that cover reliability theory/engineering/practice are geared towards professionals with advanced mathematical skills and would not necessarily be of use to executives and CEOs, who may not be quality or reliability experts but need to understand these principles when making decisions. This book addresses this important but neglected audience, introducing novel ideas based on back-to basics quality/reliability concepts in an easily understood manner. In addition, it explains basic, fresh new methods for maximizing customer satisfaction and securing a competitive edge in performance.
Web designers are no longer just web designers. To create a successful web product that's as large as Etsy, Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest-or even as small as a tiny app-you need to know more than just HTML and CSS. You need to understand how to create meaningful online experiences so that users want to come back again and again. In other words, you have to stop thinking like a web designer or a visual designer or a UX designer or an interaction designer and start thinking like a product designer. In this breakthrough introduction to modern product design, Etsy Creative Director Randy Hunt explains the skills, processes, types of tools, and recommended workflows for creating world-class web products. After reading this book, you'll have a complete understanding of what product design really is and you'll be equipped with the best practices necessary for building your own successful online products.
Design Value sheds light on a long-underestimated aspect of design, namely ist contribution to raising the value and the profile of a business. This is because quite aparet from design that is purely decorative, sophisticated design can make a valuable contribution within the economy and in the management of a company.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • At last, a book that shows you how to build—design—a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage • “Life has questions. They have answers.” —The New York Times Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home—at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve. In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.
How do today’s most successful tech companies—Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla—design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love—and that will work for your business. With sections on assembling the right people and skillsets, discovering the right product, embracing an effective yet lightweight process, and creating a strong product culture, readers can take the information they learn and immediately leverage it within their own organizations—dramatically improving their own product efforts. Whether you’re an early stage startup working to get to product/market fit, or a growth-stage company working to scale your product organization, or a large, long-established company trying to regain your ability to consistently deliver new value for your customers, INSPIRED will take you and your product organization to a new level of customer engagement, consistent innovation, and business success. Filled with the author’s own personal stories—and profiles of some of today’s most-successful product managers and technology-powered product companies, including Adobe, Apple, BBC, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix—INSPIRED will show you how to turn up the dial of your own product efforts, creating technology products your customers love. The first edition of INSPIRED, published ten years ago, established itself as the primary reference for technology product managers, and can be found on the shelves of nearly every successful technology product company worldwide. This thoroughly updated second edition shares the same objective of being the most valuable resource for technology product managers, yet it is completely new—sharing the latest practices and techniques of today’s most-successful tech product companies, and the men and women behind every great product.
Successful User Experience: Strategy and Roadmaps provides you with a hands-on guide for pulling all of the User Experience (UX) pieces together to create a strategy that includes tactics, tools, and methodologies. Leveraging material honed in user experience courses and over 25 years in the field, the author explains the value of strategic models to refine goals against available data and resources. You will learn how to think about UX from a high level, design the UX while setting goals for a product or project, and how to turn that into concrete actionable steps. After reading this book, you'll understand: - How to bring high-level planning into concrete actionable steps - How Design Thinking relates to creating a good UX - How to set UX Goals for a product or project - How to decide which tool or methodology to use at what point in product lifecycle This book takes UX acceptance as a point of departure, and builds on it with actionable steps and case studies to develop a complete strategy, from the big picture of product design, development and commercialization, to how UX can help create stronger products. This is a must-have book for your complete UX library. - Uses strategic models that focus product design and development - Teaches how to decipher what tool or methodology is right for a given moment, project, or a specific team - Presents tactics on how to understand how to connect the dots between tools, data, and design - Provides actionable steps and case studies that help users develop a complete strategy, from the big picture of product design, development, and commercialization, to how UX can help create stronger products - Case studies in each chapter to aid learning
