Well-designed
"A new way to create-and then disrupt Industry disruption is no longer isolated to a unique product or service. Today's consumer needs engagement in order to be swayed to interact, connect, and buy your next offering. Achieve this and you'll achieve success. Sharp and refreshing, design insider and expert Jon Kolko offers a new view and usable process for conceiving and building powerful, emotionally resonant new products in this new book. In Well-Designed, Kolko-VP at MyEdu and Founder and Director of the Austin Center for Design--shows how deep, meaningful engagement happens when products and services are delivered in an authentic way, when consumers see them less like manufactured artifacts and more like good friends. The key is empathy-driven design thinking, using a process of storytelling and iteration, with results that provoke emotion, change behavior, and create deep engagement. Kolko, who has been engaged in this process of design for more than 15 years, now shares a concrete set of steps for identifying lucrative opportunities, designing for innovation, and producing products that have deep, meaningful emotional engagement. By following this process, readers will learn how to raise the role of design to a strategic competency"-- "A new way to create--and then disrupt Industry disruption is no longer isolated to a unique product or service. Today's consumer needs engagement in order to be swayed to interact, connect, and buy your next offering.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
2mentions
2people
2015–2023years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The best advice is probably to learn as much as you can from different sources but also keep a pragmatic point of view that helps to select the things that apply to your situation. Very often, new leaders follow a recipe without paying attention to the organization's problems. (check the book “The First 90 Days” by Watkins; it may give you ideas to organize your initial approach).
As someone who went from engineering to product design, I observe that CTOs without a product vision are challenging to work with. For example, at a previous company, a CTO tried to implement the hard rule that every UI component should be in the shared UI library. But, even when I was leading the design system, that rule didn’t match how a product design process works. It caused delivery slowdowns and a degradation of the UX. I can bring up other examples, and the typical pattern is a leader looking at only one aspect or two without balance. Try to go beyond engineering and learn more about business and product design, which will help you prioritize engineering decisions. Some product-related books: Inspired by Cagan and Well-Designed by Kolko. Beyond engineering and product, as a C-level executive or director, people and hiring will be your primary concern. There are many management books, and I don’t have any particular to recommend (all of them will provide tools, but none is perfect: The Advantage and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Lencioni, The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim). I also enjoy taking ideas from biographical stories like Creativity Inc. by Ed Camull or Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda. Finally, a book I found funny and cynical but depicts big corps very well is “Management Stripped Bare” by Jo Owen.
- I read three books at a time, and only pick up/start/buy a new one once I finish one. Helps acquiring a large back log of unread literature around the apartment. :)
I believe HN was the reason I picked this up, if I remember correctly. It's a collection of short stories, each of which can be finished in a night, which is satisfying. I really dig his writing style and fantastical nature of the stories. I've done a bit of philosophical reading but a lot of the references he makes go over my head, leaving me to do a bit of research after each story.* Labyrinths - Jorge Louis Borges [0]
Picked this up after finishing Debbie Millman's How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer [2] (Misleading title, I would 100% recommend this book to anyone). I'm not sure what I expected, but so far this hasn't been satisfying. The first couple of chapters have been laying out a framework and defining terms. Considering swapping this out for Jon Kolko's Well Designed - How to Use Empathy To Create Products People Love [3], which seemed much more actionable after picking it up at Barnes and Noble.* The Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman [1]
Second time picking this up, originally read up to chapter on Functors over the summer. I started over this time and I'm about finished with the first section, "Language Concepts", now. It's worth noting that the entire text is available online for free on the book's website. [5] I did some Scheme in high school and read through the fist half of SICP and dabble in functional js, but this is my first experience with a semi pure functional language and I'm loving it. I'm going through the functional challenges on Hackerrank in OCaml at the same time to solidify some of the language concepts. Decided to go with OCaml over Haskell or Clojure because I'm super interested in using/contributing to Mirage OS [6]* Real World OCaml - Yaron Minsky, Anil Madhavapeddy, Jason Hickey [4][0] http://www.amazon.com/Labyrinths-Directions-Paperbook-Jorge-...
[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465050654
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Think-Like-Great-Graphic-Designer/dp/1...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Well-Designed-Empathy-Create-Products-...
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Real-World-OCaml-Functional-programmin...
[5] https://realworldocaml.org/v1/en/html/index.html
edit: formatting
