Community: Sample Chapters

This is a sample chapter from Michael J. Metts and Andy Welfle’s book Writing Is Designing: Words and the User Experience. 2020, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 3: Creating Clarity: Know What You’re Designing

One thing many writers have a strong opinion about is the serial, or Oxford, comma. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s the comma that comes before the and in a list, as in “this book is about writing, designing, and the user experience.”

Every major style guide on writing takes a firm stance. (The Associated Press Style Book, for example, is against using it, but the The Chicago Manual of Style is for it.) It’s common to see writers declare their personal stance in their Twitter profile.

“Without it,” proponents cry, “There will be chaos! No one will know to what we’re referring in lists!” Then they point to an example of an author dedicating their book to “my parents, Beyoncé and God.” Read More

This is a sample chapter from the new Two Waves book Blind Spot: Illuminating the Hidden Value of Business, by Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff, and Sean Sauber. 2016 Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 10: Design

At this point in your journey, it’s time to start making touchpoints. Let’s face it—this can be a little scary. All of the work you’ve done so far has been preparation for that big blank sheet of paper—or nowadays, more likely, a screen—that you’ll use to create ideas and concepts, and develop them into something new. Needless to say, many find this a disorienting and difficult moment. Many businesspeople treat this phase as just another check box on the to-do list.

It’s not.

Designing the offering is the most complex phase, the most critical, and although incredibly ambiguous and anxiety-producing for those who feel safe with a set recipe, the most fun. Read More

This is a sample chapter from the book Communicating the UX Vision: 13 Anti-Patterns That Block Good Ideas, by Martina Schell and James O’Brien. 2015 Morgan Kaufmann.

Chapter 16: Group Design Techniques

To get you started with group design workshop formats, we have collected our most-used techniques for building better products and services with the whole team. There are hundreds of great workshop formats that could easily fill another book, so this is just a small selection of group design formats that we use most often in our day-to-day design practices.

Facilitating a group can be challenging and mentally exhausting. If you are new to facilitation, start small and find a partner who can support you—another member of your creative group can be a great backup or give you the ability to split the group into two for some tasks, so you can concentrate on a smaller number of people. Read More