Every month in Ask UXmatters, our panel of UX experts answers our readers’ questions about a broad range of user experience matters. To get answers to your own questions about UX strategy, design, or research or any other topic of interest to UX professionals in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your questions to: [email protected].
The following experts have contributed to this edition of Ask UXmatters:
- Stephen Anderson—Chief Experience Officer at BloomBoard
- Mark Baldino—Co-founder at Fuzzy Math
- Carol Barnum—Director of User Research and Founding Partner at UX Firm; author of Usability Testing Essentials: Ready, Set … Test!
- Warren Croce—Principal UX Designer at Gazelle; Principal at Warren Croce Design
- Gerry Gaffney—Director and Principal UX Consultant at Information & Design
- Steven Hoober—Mobile Interaction Designer and Owner at 4ourth Mobile; author of Designing Mobile Interfaces; UXmatters columnist
- Peter Hornsby—UX Manager at Distribution Technology; UXmatters columnist
- Adrian Howard—Generalizing Specialist in Agile/UX
- Caroline Jarrett—Owner and Director at Effortmark Limited; UXmatters columnist
- Janet Six—Principal at Lone Star Interaction Design; UXmatters Managing Editor and columnist
Important—You can buy any of the books we’ve described in this column on Amazon now. Just click the book’s link—either a book-cover image or a book title. UXmatters will receive up to 8.5% of whatever amount you spend during that session on Amazon.
Note—I’ve organized the books into topics and ordered the topics alphabetically.
Agile Development
Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change
By Kent Beck
Second edition
“What people forget—or never knew—was that agile was a radical change for most developers, too. It broke down traditional silos. It pushed for lots of collaboration between development disciplines. It focused on cross-functional teams with strongly articulated values. It reframed development as an evolutionary, feedback-driven process rather than one that was driven by up-front planning. Agile pushed for intense collaboration with users and stakeholders—in fact, on the first XP project, a user was embedded on the development team.
“Changing from the traditional model of a big design phase that was then followed by a very hierarchical team’s building large systems in one go was an immense change. This was, quite frankly, scary to a lot of people in the development world. When I first encountered XP—on the first wiki!—in 1999, I thought it was nonsense. But, by trying things that were different—sometimes very different—from previous best practices, I’ve found better ways of building products. By the time I finally read Kent’s book, I’d already seen some of the practices work well and was eager to try others.
“The lesson that improving your culture can feel scary and counterintuitive is one that’s been useful ever since.
“What I’ve found, when working with good agile teams, is much more openness to user-centered methods than I’ve seen on non-agile teams. The feedback loops in agile provide a natural point at which to guide ongoing product work with the results of user research. The cross-functional and generalist-friendly structure of agile teams has made it much easier to embed UX roles on teams and spread UX knowledge. Whatever you think of Lean Startup or Lean UX, neither approach would exist without the agile folks first having paved the way. I wouldn’t want to work any other way. And Kent’s book was a major part of the agile movement.”—Adrian Howard, Generalizing Specialist in Agile/UX
“As a graduate student in Computer Science, I was fascinated by the breakthroughs that were happening in the field. However, at the same time, I was frustrated by the gulf between the current innovations in technology and the usability of products that were available to consumers. This was in the mid-1990s, so not everyone had a computer at home or a cell phone. Many people I knew were not interested in technology because they saw it as a hassle—or worse, just something else that would break and be an expense. As a computer-science student, I saw how technology could improve the everyday lives of many people, and I wanted to help make that happen.
“After many years of my praising the benefits of a Montessori approach to education, I finally got around to reading Maria Montessori’s book on the subject. More than a century old, the ideas are more relevant than ever: the importance of tangible learning objects—something that’s presently missing from digital learning experiences—encouraging learners to pursue their natural interests, and creating an environment that encourages this natural learning. I could go on and on! While the book is explicitly about teaching young children, it helped me to crystallize my approach to design—an approach that uses psychology to create generative play spaces where people can learn and grow. This is quite different from the conversion-focused, transactional systems with which most companies seem to be preoccupied.”—Stephen Anderson, Chief Experience Officer at BloomBoard
“I originally went to college to study aerospace engineering, and I pursued that goal pretty vigorously—even doing additional grant-funded aerospace research with people at Boeing. That work and my education brought me to a real understanding of systems thinking, how everything is connected to something else, and how rarely a success is the result of one brilliant flash of insight—or a failure, the result of one wrong move. The thing that coalesced my thinking most was the book Why Buildings Fall Down, which traces the causes of a variety of key, interesting engineering failures and, sometimes, solutions that let teams recover from them. I grew up—and still live—in Kansas City and clearly remember the Hyatt Skywalk collapse. Having that sort of simple structure fail due to a system’s not operating in intuitive ways has really stuck with me. This book is full of such examples, including that one.”—Steven Hoober, Interaction Designer and Owner at 4ourth Mobile
“What can I say about this timeless classic? It’s a beautiful story that everyone—and I mean everyone—should read. It imparts so many lessons about what is important and what is not. For designers, I believe experiences are fragile, delicate things. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, ‘The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.’ I think anyone crafting an experience should perk up at reading this. When you get down to it, our medium—user experience—is fundamentally intangible. How can we speak up for and value something so elusive?”—Stephen Anderson, Chief Experience Officer at BloomBoard
“Speaking of stories, one might describe Little Brother as 1984 for the 21st century. It’s a fictional account of a teenage hacker whose constitutional rights get trampled, following a terrorist attack in San Francisco. Yes, it’s young adult fiction. The prose is preachy, and the hero isn’t without his own flaws. But the themes are eerily prescient when you consider that the book was written years before the Snowden / NSA revelations and long before the current Trump presidency. Some consider the message subversive—I’d say so! This book was the splash of cold water I needed to move me from being merely concerned about data privacy to actually taking efforts to protect and defend what are basic human rights.”—Stephen Anderson, Chief Experience Officer at BloomBoard
“I first encountered the E-Butler in Peter F. Hamilton’s Pandora’s Star. The idea of the E-Butler is that every citizen has a digital implant that provides access to a set of sophisticated software applications. People can use these applications for automated data searches, forwarding and answering communications, paying for services, and sending personal files securely. More sophisticated E-Butlers are available that are essentially mental copies of the user’s mind, allowing users to multitask, essentially by using their own brain algorithms. Ultimately, E-Butlers are a type of artificial intelligence—or what Hamilton calls a restricted intelligence. What I like about this concept is that it takes something that could be incredibly complex, hard to define, and some years off the future and brings it into a very real world, showing both the potential for the technology and the dangers that are associated with it.”—Peter Hornsby, UX Manager at Distribution Technology
By Robert M. Pirsig
“At some point in our careers, we realize that designing great things depends on our first designing a great company culture that encourages designing great things. Following the epic success of the movies A Bug’s Life and Toy Story, Ed Catmull began devoting his energy to cultivating the creative culture that makes Pixar so great. Equal parts story and business book, Creativity, Inc. is packed with many brilliant gems about how to create and nurture a creative culture. This is perhaps the best business book I’ve read—especially for those of us who work in a creative space where things are constantly changing—in other words, nearly everything UX designers do.”—Stephen Anderson, Chief Experience Officer at BloomBoard
“The book that has been most influential on my career is not about design. It is Managing the Professional Services Firm, by David Maister. The book offers clear tactical and strategic advice on how to structure and run a consultancy. In particular, it focuses on how to select and treat your clients; how to market and sell your services; and how to manage, motivate, and encourage growth on your team. So, while the book is not directed at designers, the information it contains can benefit anyone who works with and for other people.”—Mark Baldino, Co-Founder at Fuzzy Math
“The book I’d like to nominate is Robert Townsend’s Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits, which was published in 1970. Robert Townsend was the CEO of Avis when they came up with their famous slogan ‘We Try Harder.’ This short book is an alphabetical series of reflections on management. Townsend strongly believed in the user-centered design of organizations and of business. He structured Avis ‘as if people matter,’ and the book is full of sensible advice. The section on people is well worth the cost of the book, all on its own.
By Tony Hsieh
“The first book that comes to mind for me is Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore. I see it’s now in its 3rd edition, which was published in 2014, so I guess it’s continuing to find readership. Moore is probably best known for his technology adoption lifestyle, which starts with first adopters, which are called innovators, then moves to early adopters, then the early majority and late majority, and finally, to the laggards. The chasm, from a technology-adoption perspective, occurs between the early adopters and early majority. Usability comes in once a product crosses the chasm and is making its way into the mainstream market. That may sound counterintuitive, but Moore says first and early adopters don’t care about usability. They just want to be the first to have whatever new thing is on the market. However, if new products are going to be successful, they’ll have to pass the usability test to make it into the mainstream market. This book seems as relevant today as it ever was.”—Carol Barnum, Director of User Research and Founding Partner at UX Firm
“While I was well schooled in technology, I had no training in sales. But I knew that I must become knowledgeable in the art of selling to progress in my field. In the future, I hope more universities include basic business training in all of their degree programs, so graduates can better apply their knowledge in the real world. I was fortunate enough to attend an 
“Another classic that comes to mind is The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places, by Reeves and Nass. They were conducting research at Stanford University that revealed people treat computers like humans—so much so that they give higher marks to a training program when they evaluate it on a different computer from the one they used for the training. And that’s just one example from the fascinating studies that the book reports.”—Carol Barnum, Director of User Research and Founding Partner at UX Firm
By Clifford Nass and Corina Yen
