It's Our Research: Getting Stakeholder Buy-in for User Experience Research Projects
by Tomer Sharon
"A great indication of research uptake is that research recommendations — especially the most important ones — are followed." (p. 211)
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Who This Is For: This book is great for non-researchers and early career to mid-level practitioners. Even as a mid-level to senior researcher, I find myself grabbing this book from time to time!
- Why I Find It Helpful: It's highly practical. You'll find the strategies that Sharon offers can be easily implemented in your day-to-day practice especially if you deal with stakeholder challenges a lot. What stands out to me the most is how the book covers both research and soft skills:
- Sharon teaches how to improve our research skills from start to finish such as picking the right method, coming up with effective research goals and questions, building a plan, and creating a functional report for different audiences.
- He also pairs these with soft skills like selling your research and keeping your stakeholders engaged throughout your research process.
- The ultimate goal is to ensure that research findings don't just get heard but actually lead to action (which is what the quote is all about!).
- Where to Get this Book: Amazon
*I recently learned that Tomer Sharon has passed away. I'm thankful for the knowledge he was able to pass on for the next generation of UX-ers.
Figure It Out
by Stephen P. Anderson & Karl Fast
"But forget not— the brain is not the mind. If you multiply 32 by 11 in your head, the cognitive work happens in your brain. Where does it happen when you use pencil and paper? Not in your brain and not in the pencil either. It happens everywhere, spread across brain, hand, pencil, and graphite symbols etched on the page" (p. 296-297)
- Who This Is For: This book is great for all levels of UX professionals, data scientists, and those who want to understand complex data.
- Why I Find It Helpful: The book has a ton of useful information. Where I think the book excels are:
- When people say, "We need more data!", what they are really saying is "We have information but we don't know what to make of it"—an equivalent of analysis paralysis. The first half of the book dives into how the brain fundamentally thinks through everyday associations with everything around us— elaborated stories, visual metaphors, and carefully crafted words.
- Visuals are powerful. To make sense of difficult data or topics, we often use external representations like sketches, graphs, and charts. What's more important is that true understanding comes from scrutinizing these visuals ourselves and being intentional with every association we invoke.
- A foundation of good research, regardless of the method, is to uncover users' mental model and their ecosystem. This is where the second half of the book shines. It draws many examples and stories about how people think about distributed cognitive resources by expanding their locus of understanding.
- Putting this into a simple example, say you want to understand how users interact with a product. We must step back and think about the entire system. Some examples might be: When and where do they use the product? What triggers the behavior? What other tools do they use? I already ask these questions today, but this book explains why this frame of thinking is important.
- Where to Get this Book: Amazon
Conversational Design
by Erika Hall
"We designers demand creativity of ourselves, but don't anticipate it in the people we design for. That's a failure of imagination. Expecting that people will behave "correctly" is the path to fragile interactions." (p. 73)
- Who This Is For: It is great for all levels of UX professionals, builders, and business owners. Just replace the word "designers" and "design" in the quote above to our role and our goal with the customers.
- Why I Find It Helpful: This book is an excellent companion especially in the age of conversational AI. In order to build a successful user interface, we can draw from how humans converse and interact with one another.
- Hall starts with the maxims of interactions, then translates them to digital spaces. This sets a framework on how to build a great conversational interface through principles such as context-aware (the system responds appropriately based on users' context) and turn-based (communicate when the system is "thinking").
- I can easily use this framework at work when helping teams build AI features.
- Where to Get this Book: This website (Download the pdf version for free), Amazon (If you want a paper copy)
*The author is coming up with an updated edition sometime this year!
A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind
by Ann Wolbert Burgess & Steven Matthew Constantine
"One by one, I hit play and listened closely until each cassette whirred to a stop. I took notes and listened again. The conversations showed the killers’ arrogance and were fascinating and haunting. The interviews were also poorly structured and had zero footing in any conventional school of research. They showed no uniformity between sessions, no apparent planning, and no eye toward future analysis. The only goal seemed to be to keep the killers talking. Still, I was impressed." (p. 19)
- Who This Is For: Anyone who believes in good research.
- Why I Find It Helpful: OK this is an outlier. It's not a UX or product-specific book, but our field draws (and should draw!) from multi-disciplinary perspectives. At the writing of this blog, I'm about 20% through the book and I'm already blown away.
- In the early 80s, Dr. Burgess was brought in to help the FBI understand why murderers do what they do. She was already helping patients with psychiatric needs, typically women with sexual trauma. In this quest, she had to flip her work from understanding the victim to getting into the minds of the perpetrators.
- This book shows the importance of using sound research methodology like interview protocols to truly understand our customers, users, or in this case, murderers and serial killers. Dr. Burgess also had to navigate challenging stakeholders aka the skeptical, male FBI agents and get them aligned on their mission (remember how the first book is teaching us these skills!).
- One of her impacts was drawing murderer profiles— in UX context, personas of the murderers. This helped the FBI catch a serial killer who gruesomely slashed two young boys in Woodford County, Nebraska. The killer was later found to be associated with another case in Maine where he lived before moving to Nebraska."
- Where to Get this Book: Amazon
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