A lively and readable overview of the philosophy behind making things for people.
Buley and Natoli offer guidelines for better design in this nonfiction book.
The authors here detail the world of user experience and design and break down the methods and practices that can be tightened or tweaked to improve UX for everybody involved, even if the actual UX team is very small. They present their insights in a visually varied way: The book is full of illustrations, insets, color-coded sections, and lists of bullet points. Buley and Natoli acknowledge how significantly the UX field has changed in the last two decades, from the software-design emphasis of years past to the mobile and app orientation of the present moment. “Today, we understand that a digital product is almost always a full, multichannel experience,” they write, “and that our job is to give people a seamless product experience, even as they jump from desktop to laptop to mobile to tablet and back again.” Good products, they posit, have the ultimate UX goal of being so smoothly integrated into the users’ lives that they become invisible. It’s not about “tapping the Like icon” but simply expressing support; it’s also not about “formatting a Google document” but simply writing. “If you’re a product maker,” the authors assert, “this is nirvana.” Buley and Natoli write with this tone of bright enthusiasm throughout their text, which often broadens out to address overall customer service (they refer to customers as “the core of user experience”) or even general personal interactions, as when they break down ways to improve the meetings that even the most focused UX specialists can’t avoid. The authors suggest saying “we” instead of “I,” for instance, and sharing the “why” behind questions (“this defuses defensiveness by communicating that your curiosity is not a challenge or contradiction; it’s an honest desire to know more”). UX experts—and virtually everybody else—will find all of this invigorating food for thought.
A lively and readable overview of the philosophy behind making things for people.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9781933820187
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Rosenfeld Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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