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Fail a lot, learn from mistakes, and organize stuff in a way that suits you.
Can't find "inspiration" just copy a known design that works well and back it up with testing. Everyone in this field has stood on the shoulders of giants to get the work done. I constantly tell people not to re-invent the wheel.
If you had to reach for one book, make it "The User Experience Team of One" by Leah Buley.
Stay away from Twitter and Medium as sources of wisdom...it is mostly drivel from people trying to get a following instead of furthering their craft.
I highly recommend reading "Continuous Discovery" - the business and product value should be the no 1 priority and should deeply influence design - to do that effectively we need constant communication with customers, asking more useful questions, and have Product managers, tech leads and team leads on those calls to directly understand pain/use cases, etc that drive value, and then they can translate that into testable hypotheses that you can methodologically work through before your write any code
By the time you're writing the code, you should have a decent understanding of the forest and the trees and you can work quickly and confidently
Actually...this reminds me the point of the book "Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell. The whole book describes situations where a small change started a snowball effect and created a huge change. In fact many of the stories are about political situations with a conquering power and resistance where a small group of people where able to make such a difference where they eventually beat the big powerful controlling government.
One of the stories was about how the IRA was able to fight back against the British for so long even though the British army was so powerful. Another was in France when it was controlled I think by the Nazi's (don't remember exactly but sounds right). How a small group of locals where able to oppose the controlling power.
This is the description from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Tipping-Point-Little-Things-Difference/dp/0316346624
> The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.
On the flip side the book explains why so many dictatorships are so concerned about anti-government speech and want to control all the media.
Anyway I guess the point is...you just have to get enough of a momentum behind an idea so that it starts spreading and can topple entire regimes.
So I think that part is actually very realistic. Hitler understands that all of his subjects have to think that they are absolutely controlled and that there is no alternate way except death.
These films show an alternate way.
It’s on the sub’s booklist, but let me +1 The Goal. There’s a danger/tendency for folks starting out in CI to fall in love with tools. Process maps, SIPOCs, whatever, early career practitioners conflate the tools with the work. The Goal focuses on the concepts, not the tools, and helps you develop a CI perspective that carries regardless of which tool is getting used. This is important, because you need to fit the tools to the problem, not approach every problem the same way.
A Tipping Point.
The term was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
General piece of advice on your role: buy "The User Experience Team of One" right now, very applicable for your situation. Great advice on small steps you can take when you don't have the time/budget/scope for full blown research, testing, etc.
https://smile.amazon.com/User-Experience-Team-One-Research/dp/1933820187/
It does, but a huge chunk of organizations have a User Experience Team of One. Hard to become an expert collaborator when organizations tend to silo designers, too.
This book has a great process and some other brainstorming and research techniques that you might not have thought of. https://www.amazon.com/Hello-My-Name-Awesome-Create/dp/1626561869
In addition to a name, take the time to optimize your local Google listing and add a blog to your website that focuses on your area and pet care for SEO.
I control "f"ed for tipping point- that's where I first heard the statistic. Book by Malcolm Gladwell The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Since you mentioned SVPG, you can look into their risk framework since you are pretty early on with your product. Combine that with Teresa Torres’s continuous discovery framework and you should have the framework to quickly focus on a prioritized list of what to build with first after you’ve derisked all your ideas and hypotheses on what to build.
Competitive landscaping and user research/concept testing will probably be your best bet here early on. Map our your customer journey, identify painpoints, and then identify opportunities. Use the assumption mapping framework from Teresa and use that to drive what you define as your MVP to build with a prototype and get that in front of your potential users as soon as you can.
There’s a novel about this in the real world, too. Whether you’re a business type or not, if you like Factorio you’ll probably enjoy this book. It’s an easy read
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement - 30th Anniversary Edition https://www.amazon.com/dp/0884271951/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_6WCS78TZK0YPGPHR8G67
I took a couple marketing classes back in school & marketing is almost more important than the product itself, because if no one knows you exist, no one can appreciate your work, sell it, carry it in a gallery, print it, publish it, etc.
Also, your story trumps all. I always recommend people read or listen to the audiobook of "All Marketers are Liars" by Seth Godin, which talks about how people don't buy price or features or functionality, they buy a story:
>when I read it a few years back, it felt 'contrived' in some areas
Even though I knocked it out in a weekend and ultimately enjoyed it as a bit of light reading, that was ultimately my sense as well. I was bugged a bit by the narrator's guardian angel guy who constantly appeared out of nowhere at the right time to drop another lesson from The Goal.
I guess that's not as interesting as having a couple of sentences towards the start of the book:
>"While I was doing the thing I met a potential shareholder (or whatever) and in our conversation he mentioned a book called The Goal. I ordered it off Amazon and read it." > >-- two chapters later -- > >"The website blew up and blahblah scenario building blah. For some reason while the CEO was screaming at the sysadmin, the lesson from chapter three of The Goal came to mind. It was like an epiphany - we could apply it to this scenario in the following ways: x, y, z."
Actually, now that I put it that way, I think that may have been a better story: guy reads The Goal and figures out organically how to stumble his fucked legacy IT situation towards something we might recognise as DevOps. It'd be even better if it took into account other books like Turn The Ship Around. Just take the guardian angel character, whatever his name was, out of it.
Surprised no one has taken the opportunity to link to Teresa’s book. If you are able to join one of her live classes it was worth every cent and I was able to implement learnings in my work even after the first class.
No, but it could be so much better.
Checkout Hello My Name is Awesome, sooo worth it.
It’s a short (and really funny) actionable read, she goes into how a good name is not only memorable, but will drive business.
Continuous Discovery Habits for sure.
Teresa Torres is like a spiritual successor to Marty Cagan except she actually tells you how to do things.
The process for people in your situation is generally called "feeding the beast."
I would advise you to work on a design strategy and a maturity model on how you can evolve out of this situation and to staff up a team of professionals.
In the meantime, check out: The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide
I wouldn't say I have a strategy, but I'm reading books with a specific goal in mind generally.
> There's lot of content to remember.
Do you remember every single page of The Hobbit, or just the major plot points?
Everyone's "major plot points" when you're reading on a technical topic are going to be different. I'm not trying to commit to memory every single page of DDIA -- that's a fool's errand. I'm reading it again now because we're currently having architecture discussions around a major refactor for our data extraction layer. It's a good book to complement those discussions. I recently had a chat with a staff engineer about that book. Both I and that engineer got totally different "major plot points" out of the book because we work on meaningfully different things.
I recently read The Goal for the first time because I inherited a team who's punted a major feature roll-out for ~3 years running now due to a substantial lack of confidence in other areas of the organization to deliver on their end of things.
I read a dozen or so different books on people/engineering management my first year as a manager because I didn't know WTF I was doing at all or where to even start. Those books complemented 1:1s with my boss exceptionally well, and lead to several more focused discussions with our HR director.
The best resource I've seen on aligning company and employee goals is Building a Fair Pay Program by Plachy and Plachy.
While not specifically geared towards your question, you might also want to read the manufacturing classic The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Goldratt. It's life changing if you have a production environment.
Sure!
I'm a big fan of something called The Theory of Constraints, it dovetails with being a Servant Leader. The basic premise is to identify your team's constraints and work to increase capacity at the constraints through automation, streamlining efficacy, or hiring more people.
In Ops, you should focus on automation and streamlining efficiency.
Ask your team managers and the front-line employees "What's the thing you're spending the most time on?", then focus on making that thing take less time. Once you're done, ask what's the new thing they are spending the most time on, rinse, repeat!
Sometimes you will find things that you can't reduce time spent on but, if that happens, then consider asking for a new hire to be made to increase capacity.
That's the basic concept, read a book called The Goal to help explain. It's not a really well-written book but the framework can help give you a process for continuous improvement.
On a more tactical level, there are three things Ops should always work to be top notch on:
- Risk (Identification, Documentation, and Resolution)
- Account Management
- The Customer Journey
This is a great book: "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age". Describes the creation of so many things we take for granted now (ethernet, laser printing, guis, oop). And it really does capture how Xerox corporate couldn't figure out what to do with PARC.
Hi friends! A new book has been selected for this month's Book Club.
The book of choice with maximum votes is "Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres"!
Pl join us on slack to discuss the book and for further updates on the meetup!
https://join.slack.com/t/pm-book-club/shared_invite/zt-e806scsz-DKKKtJYMBgj9T0P2ITclTg
https://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Discovery-Habits-Discover-Products/dp/1736633309/
Measurables should be in terms of customer outcomes, not engineer's actions. I'm in ecommerce, we have goals around reducing abandoned carts, repeat retention, bought together with upsells, etc.
Try proposing something that drives the business outcome, not just raw engineering activity, and see where it lands. FWIW we do this across a pretty large (~100) set of engineers spread over a dozen or so services and it actually does help with large team coordination. It helps avoid local optima's and encourages teams to subordinate their goals in support of a team that may ultimately be able to have a greater impact. For example, we recently got our loyalty team to build a one click sign up for use in the Cart flow, at the expense of loyalty team's initial data that they use as feedback into ad targeting. It had a substantial impact on the number of customers who created accounts (they pay us more over time) and they found other was to gather that data later. Ultimately Loyalty was fine and our overall sales went up. Win win, because our Staff Engineers were told to chase company level goals, not team level goals.
See if you can spin it that way. If you can, then it means your CEO is working from Theory of Constraints and probably has this book on their nightstand right now.
My information comes from "The Tipping Point" in which it quotes scientific research on genetics. There are markers in each animal that roughly correlate to the size of a pack or tribe. In humans those same markers correlate to roughly 130. (I think it might be 132, but the exact number isn't something I committed to memory.)
In the same book there is a Company that actually employs the method I listed above. In fact, at each facility they make the parking spaces 150 in size. Once the people start parking on the grass they make a new facility and move a portion there. It's a fascinating practice and shows the strength of working with our genetics rather than against.
/r/industrialengineering and /r/systems_engineering have a lot of posts that answer these types of questions if you haven't visited them yet(though not specifically about UW). I can't really answer most of your questions but I can recommend the book The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, it helped me get a feel for the type of work industrial engineers do.
It amazes me how many parallels I see between these actions and these teachings which in my views may have been valid once when global communication was muted; but now that connections are bridged through the Internet completely fall apart. And yet I STILL constantly see business/markets cling desperately to these dusty philosophies...
So as someone who's been a visual designer for a while and just landed my first UX job I'm probably reasonably qualified to answer this.
The biggest thing to note is that it's a lot more involved than most expect it to be. There's lots of graphic designers who call themselves UX designers and they're just...not. Having experience making websites does not make one a UX designer.
As far getting started, just dig in. I found the courses at the Interaction Design Foundation really helpful (and affordable), and I also read everything I could find (both books and on articles on Medium). The User Experience Team of One is a great overview of the UX process and different approaches but there's lots of UX book lists out there that have some great resources. Software is a part of it as well, Sketch is pretty easy to pick up as is xD, and for prototyping InVision Studio is free for individuals.
Outside of that, start making stuff. I got a bit lucky and had a few UX related projects come up at a small software company, but you can create and showcase your own projects (there's lots of case studies on things like this out there).
One other thing to keep in mind is that UX design roles can vary widely. I'm not fully qualified to be a pure UX designer yet, but my new role is a hybrid of UI design and UX while other UX designers barely do any visual design.
Hope that helps, good luck!
The only book you need to read to understand how to write an engaging sales letter (an ad with the intent to convert a customer) is read joseph sugarman's adweek copywriting handbook. Heres the link: https://www.amazon.com/Adweek-Copywriting-Handbook-Advertising-Copywriters/dp/0470051248/ref=mp_s_a_1_1
I plug this constantly because it's really great:
https://www.amazon.com/User-Experience-Team-One-Research/dp/1933820187
This will answer a lot of your questions and it fits perfectly to your situation.