Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services 1st Edition

This book was recommend purchase for DesignLab and it's a plethora of information. The author has a solid understanding and grasp of today's market. I recommended this book to my mentor as well. If you're studying UI or UX Design or want to know about the business of digital design I highly recommend it. Caveat, the book is huge I don't recommend you carry it around however if possible. Hopefully it will be available in ebook format.

Alan Cooper created Goal-Directed Design methodology, which he introduced in his influential 1998 book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. He also founded Cooper, a leading interaction design consultancy. In his foreword to Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services, he says this about the author:

"Kim Goodwin has been a prime participant in the dialog at Cooper since 1997. She has been one of the major contributors to the development of our design methodology. She is an authority on design, problem scoping, engagement management, and design documentation. Kim has labored in the trenches in a broad variety of design segments, from clinical medicine to conceptual blockbusting. She has led groups of designers, coordinating their work, and synchronizing it with the needs of some very demanding clients.

"And she has taught others to design. Many hundreds of people have gotten a taste of Kim's clarity, patience, thoroughness, and rigor by attending her presentations and at conferences, her one-day field seminars, or her design courses. In fact, Kim has been the primary creator of training content for our very successful Cooper U classes. Over the years, her particular expertise at observation, synthesis, and communication while in charge of other design teams and honed in the classroom, led her to write this book. Much of the content and wisdom gleaned from those classes is evident here."

It is quickly apparent that the book was produced from tried and true application, not just concepts and theory. It is filled with comprehensive examples of real product designs, that not only clearly illustrate the processes, but also gives them enormous credibility. At the same time, the foundation of the book is a deeply held conviction about design and best way to do it.

"Design is the craft of visualizing concrete solutions that serve human needs and goals within certain constraints. Design is a craft because it is neither science nor art, but somewhere in between. In order for design to be design and not art, it must serve human needs and goals. Finally, design always happens within certain constraints."

"Goal-Directed Design encompasses the design of a product's behavior, visual form, and physical form. Its fundamental premise is that the best way to design a successful product is to focus on achieving goals."

"The Goal-Directed method is a set of tools and best practices developed entirely through practice in the real world. The method consists of four components: principles, patterns, process, and practices."

After briefly discussing principles (guidelines for creating good solutions under specific circumstances) and patterns (types of solutions that tend to be useful for certain classes of problems), the book devotes almost 700 pages to a detailed description of process and practices. The process and practices are grouped into seven stages of a design project:

1. Getting Started
2. Research
3. Modeling
4. Requirements
5. Framework
6. Detailed Design
7. Ensuring Success

One of my initial concerns was that the process and practices described require a large team of diverse specialists, which few companies can afford, working over a relatively long total timeline. While the book states that the methodology can be scaled for smaller teams and a shorter timeline, I had my doubts. However, I recently had an opportunity to develop a project plan directly with Cooper for the design of role-based user interfaces for genomics research laboratory software, and I saw, firsthand, that the process can be effectively scaled to address limited resources and tight timelines.

Alan Cooper also writes, "This book is comprehensive in its scope, exhaustive in its depth, authoritative in its practice, and priceless in its wisdom. It will certainly become the anchor document for an entire practice. While I expect to see it on the bookshelves of every practicing designer, I further expect that it will spend the lion's share of its time off the shelf and at the elbow of hard-working designers."

I've read about 60% of the book over 24 months in a non-linear manner, and it is very possible that I will never read the complete book. However, it has taken its place with a select group of books that I refer to constantly for real-world problem solving. This is not a book to read, but rather a book to use, and I strongly recommend it for anyone involved in any function of interaction design.

Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services serves as an excellent guide and reference for new and experienced human centered design practitioners. Kim Goodwin (VP of Cooper) does a great job translating her goal-oriented design processes into clear and understandable terms. Human/user centered design books can easily be littered with heavy jargon or unintelligible references that make it difficult or impossible to understand or practice. Goodwin makes a conscious effort to explain and visualize many of the concepts introduced in each chapter and keeps the research lingo within reason. For example, in Chapter 12: Defining Requirements, Goodwin dispels what requirements aren't (i.e. features or specifications) and promptly outlines what is needed to generate effective requirements (i.e. data needs, functional needs, product / service qualities, constraints). In addition, Goodwin's writing style guarantees a cognitive learning experience with most readers by providing multiple exercises and scenarios that engage and evoke a desire for comprehension. The photography, diagrams, and charting are plentiful and supplement the subject matter effectively also.

I believe that this book is easily a pylon supporting the ever-swelling weight of UCD with its hoard of overlapping design disciplines. I recommend it to anyone interested in design or the design process...

Table of Contents:

Getting Started
Chapter 1: Goal-Directed Product and Service Design
Chapter 2: Assembling the Team
Chapter 3: Project Planning
Research
Chapter 4: Research Fundamentals
Chapter 5: Understanding the Business
Chapter 6: Planning User Research
Chapter 7: Understanding Potential Users and Customers
Chapter 8: Example Interview
Chapter 9: Other Sources of Information and Inspiration
Modeling
Chapter 10: Making Sense of Your Data: Modeling
Chapter 11: Personas
Requirements
Chapter 12: Defining Requirements
Chapter 13: Putting It All Together: The User and Domain Analysis
Framework
Chapter 14: Framework Definition: Visualizing Solutions
Chapter 15: Principles and Patterns for Framework Design
Chapter 16: Designing the Form Factor and Interaction Framework
Chapter 17: Principles and Patterns in Design Language
Chapter 18: Developing the Design Language
Chapter 19: Communicating the Framework and Design Language
Detailed Design
Chapter 20: Detailed Design: Making Your Ideas Real
Chapter 21: Detailed Design Principles and Patterns
Chapter 22: Detailed Design Process and Practices
Chapter 23: Evaluating Your Design
Chapter 24: Communicating Detailed Design
Ensuring Success
Chapter 25: Supporting Implementation and Launch
Chapter 26: Improving Design Capabilities in Individuals and Organizations

I read this book for school and appreciated how concise yet wholesome each chapter was. It's heavy material, but the content is critical for the UX practitioner. The chapters about different deliverables are really fleshed out which can make some of the reading tedious, but the book really does hit all corners.

INTERACTION DESIGN is NOT USER INTERFACE DESIGN! This is such a common misconception.

This book is an absolute MUST READ for ANYONE building products and services in today's economy. Not only is this the most concrete book on the subject of Interaction Design, I would argue that this should become required reading for every Product Manager and MBA student.

This book is very well organized and designed, further proof that design is about building better products for users--not just aesthetics. It is also very easy to read and packed with loads of useful information.

Reading this will essentially give you a tried and tested step-by-step product design process proven by an established expert working at a well known design firm. After reading, this will become your favorite reference book.

As companies are moving towards this "Design Thinking" process, this book will be my number one recommendation. [...]