This is a collection of books that have been recommended by members of the Transport Canada UX community.
Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience (Second Edition)
Author(s): Tom Greever
Available Formats: Paperback, eBook or audiobook
This practical guide focuses on principles, tactics, and actionable methods for presenting your designs. Whether you design apps, websites, or products, you’ll learn how to get support from people who have influence over the project with the goal of creating the best user experience.
Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals
Author(s): Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
Available formats: Paperback, eBook or audiobook
Don't simply show your data—tell a story with it! Storytelling with Data teaches you the fundamentals of data visualization and how to communicate effectively with data. You'll discover the power of storytelling and the way to make data a pivotal point in your story. The lessons in this illuminative text are grounded in theory, but made accessible through numerous real-world examples—ready for immediate application to your next graph or presentation.
Design for Impact: Your Guide to Designing Effective Product Experiments
Author(s): Erin Weigel
Available formats: Paperback or eBook
Design for Impact is a down-to-earth A/B testing guide. It features the Conversion Design process to operationalize effective experimentation in your company. In it, Erin Weigel gives you practical tips and tools to design better experiments at scale. She does this with self-deprecating humor that will leave you smiling—if not laughing aloud. As a bonus, The Good Experimental Design toolkit presents everything you learn into step-by-step process for you to use each day.
Badass: Making Users Awesome
Author(s): Kathy Sierra
Available formats: Paperback or eBook
Our goal is to craft a strategy for creating successful users. And that strategy is full of surprising, counter-intuitive, and astonishingly simple techniques that don’t depend on a massive marketing or development budget. Techniques typically overlooked by even the most well-funded, well-staffed product teams.
Badass: Making Users Awesome: Sierra, Kathy: Books - Amazon.ca
Good Services: How to Design Services that Work
Author(s): Lou Downe
Available formats: Paperback or eBook
Service design is a rapidly growing area of interest in design and business management. There are a lot of books on how to get started, but this is the first book that describes what a "good" service is and how to design one. This book lays out the essential principles for building services that work well for users. Demystifying what we mean by a "good" and "bad" service and describing the common elements within all services that mean they either work for users or don't.
Good Services: How to Design Services that Work: Downe, Louise: Books - Amazon.ca
How Design Makes the World
Author(s): Scott Berkun
Available formats: Paperback, eBook or audiobook
In How Design Makes The World, bestselling author and designer Scott Berkun reveals how designers, from software engineers to city planners, have succeeded and failed us. From the airplane armrest to the Facebook “like” button, and everything in between, Berkun shows how design helps or hinders everyone, and offers a new way to think about the world around you.
How Design Makes the World: Berkun, Scott: Books - Amazon.ca
Notes on Design: How Creative Practice Works
Author(s): Kees Dorst
Available formats: Paperback
The enjoyable essays in this book provide a panoramic view of design. They are written to encourage designers and students to reflect upon their field. Fundamental questions are raised about the nature of design, about designers themselves, and about the role of design within the broader contexts of business and society.
Notes on Design: How Creative Practice Works: Dorst, Kees: Books - Amazon.ca
Strategic Design: 8 Essential Practices Every Strategic Designer Must Master
Author(s): Giulia Calabretta, Gerda Gemser, Ingo Karpen
Available formats: Paperback
This book introduces eight strategic design practices. These practices help the design professionals become familiar with effective tools for strategic innovation projects and give them a set of guidelines for easily and quickly applying these practices and tools.
This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World
Author(s): by Marc Stickdorn, Markus Edgar Hormess, Adam Lawrence, Jakob Schneider
Available formats: Paperback or eBook
How can you establish a customer-centric culture in an organization? This is the first comprehensive book on how to actually do service design to improve the quality and the interaction between service providers and customers. You'll learn specific facilitation guidelines on how to run workshops, perform all of the main service design methods, implement concepts in reality, and embed service design successfully in an organization.
Creative Clarity: A practical guide for bringing creative thinking into your company
Author(s): Jon Kolko
Available formats: Paperback or eBook
This book is built on a simple premise: Most companies don't know what creativity really is, so they can't benefit from it. They lack creative clarity.
Why We Work
Author(s): Barry Schwartz
Available formats: Hardcover, eBook or audiobook
We’ve long been taught that the reason we work is primarily for a paycheck. In fact, we’ve shaped much of the infrastructure of our society to accommodate this belief. Then why are so many people dissatisfied with their work, despite healthy compensation? And why do so many people find immense fulfillment and satisfaction through “menial” jobs? Schwartz explores why so many believe that the goal for working should be to earn money, how we arrived to believe that paying workers more leads to better work, and why this has made our society confused, unhappy, and has established a dangerously misguided system.
How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business
Author(s): Douglas W. Hubbard
Available formats: Hardcover or eBook
This insightful and eloquent book will show you how to measure those things in your own business, government agency or other organization that, until now, you may have considered "immeasurable," including customer satisfaction, organizational flexibility, technology risk, and technology ROI.
The New Designer: Rejecting Myths, Embracing Change
Author(s): Manuel Lima
Available formats: Hardcover or eBook
The choices made by designers have a significant effect on the world. Yet so much of the discourse on design focuses on aesthetics rather than ethics. In The New Designer, acclaimed author Manuel Lima aims to change this by challenging common myths and preconceptions about what comprises good design. He argues that designers must take responsibility for the personal, societal, cultural, and environmental impact of their work, rather than simply following a standard template.
The New Designer: Rejecting Myths, Embracing Change: Lima, Manuel: Books - Amazon.ca
Time to Listen: How Giving People Space to Speak Drives Invention and Inclusion
Author(s): Indi Young, Zulaikha Rahman (Foreword), Anna Iurchenko (Illustrator)
Available formats: Paperback or eBook
Product design strategy often seeks first to grow the number of users, and to steer them in ways that benefit the organization. This mindset has driven our organizations into a corner, focused on improving the product. Even when product design teams want to benefit people, they often discover they've harmed people instead by neglecting the diversity of approaches and thinking.
In this book, world-class researcher Indi Young teaches you how to listen deeply to help your organization move away from a product-focused strategy toward a measurable strategy centered on people and their purpose.
Design: The Key Concepts
Author(s): D.J. Huppatz
Available formats: Hardcover, paperback or eBook
Design is everywhere. It shapes not only our present but also our future. An essential introductory guide, Design: The Key Concepts covers fundamental design concepts: thinking, service, context, interaction, experience, and systems. Each concept is situated within a broad context, enabling the reader to understand design's contemporary practice and its relationship to issues such as new technology, social and economic development, globalization, and sustainability. Concepts are also explained by use of concise, illustrated case studies of contemporary objects, spaces, systems, and methods such as Uber, the iPhone, Kickstarter and IKEA. Chapter summaries and supporting discussion questions make this an engaging and accessible introduction for students and those new to the field. An annotated bibliography provides direction for further reading.
Design Strategy: Challenges in Wicked Problem Territory (Design Thinking, Design Theory)
Author(s): Nancy C. Roberts
Available formats: Paperback or eBook
Conflicts over “the problem” and “the solution” plague the modern world and land problem solvers in what has been called “wicked problem territory”—a social space with high levels of conflict over problems and solutions. In Design Strategy, Nancy C. Roberts proposes design as a strategy of problem solving to close the gap between an existing state and a desired state. Utilizing this approach, designers and change agents are better able to minimize self-defeating conflicts over problems and solutions, break the logjam of opposition, and avoid the traps that lock problem solvers into a never-ending cycle of conflict.
Digital Design: A History
Author(s): Stephen Eskilson
Available formats: Hardcover or eBook
Digital design has emerged as perhaps the most dynamic force in society, occupying a fluid, experimental space where product design intersects with art, film, business, engineering, theater, music, and artificial intelligence. Stephen Eskilson traces the history of digital design from its precursors in the nineteenth century to its technological and cultural ascendency today, providing a multifaceted account of a digital revolution that touches all aspects of our lives.
Digital Design: A History: Eskilson, Stephen: Books - Amazon.ca
Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
Author(s): Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz
Available formats: Hardcover, eBook, audiobook or audio CD
Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution?
Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the Design Sprint, created at Google by Jake Knapp. This method is like fast-forwarding into the future, so you can see how customers react before you invest all the time and expense of creating your new product, service, or campaign.