I was very disappointed when I learned that this wasn't about designing books that think.
Design Thinking Books (2024)
41–50 of 164 posts
Re: Design Thinking Books (2024)
#42I love 101 Things I Learned at Architecture School.
It's a very light, approachable book, dealing with surprisingly universal principles. Also it has very nice pictures.
Most of it also applies to game dev, and to the design of experiences.
Re: Design Thinking Books (2024)
#43I'm a dev and recently picked up "The Design of Everyday Things" as an attempt to become more design-oriented. Everyone raves about this being like the bible of design. So far I'm about 80 pages in and have found it extremely academic and not very practical, sometimes deriving conclusions that are so far from reality that they are a bit concerning, like how a strong password does not matter because once they inevitab…
Like you say, it's old and I'm nostalgic for the time that I associate reading it with. I think that explains some of the love folks (or at least me) have for it.
I've never revisited the book and thanks to your comment I might not ever now ha
Re: Design Thinking Books (2024)
#44Please don’t use Design Thinking. Design Thinking is a subset of Systems Thinking (this is the polite interpretation). Design Thinking does with its sole existence what Systems Thinking tried to avoid: Another category to put stuff into, divide and conquer. It is an over-simplified version of the original theories. Better: Jump directly to Systems Thinking, Cybernetics and Systems Theory (and if measurements are more…
Design Thinking (and more broadly, human-centered design) is a pragmatic framework for doing product design in an effective and productive manner. Systems Thinking is a massively more general superset. I'm not really sure how you'd operationalize that on a design project, except by following first principles, which would essentially get you to DT / HCD.
Re: Design Thinking Books (2024)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was gifted this book my a CIO when in college. She had a dozen copies in her office to hand out to various people. It took me a few tries to get up the will to actually read it. It was years ago, so I don’t remember a lot of details. My main take away was to make controls logical for the thing being controlled. “Norman doors” are the big one, but I often think about it while I’m in my car trying to do something on…
My car has a staggeringly bad UI design choice - the cancel active navigation the control to do this only appears when you hold your finger close to the screen. Pretty much every time I want to do this I am flummoxed as to "Where did the button go" - before I eventually remember. The navigation system is good - I prefer it to using my phone and CarPlay but that design is terrible.
Is it a VW? I had a VW with a proximity sensor like that. I didn’t use the in-car navigation, but it did that for the favorites on the radio. They only showed as I moved my finger close to the screen.
Re: Design Thinking Books (2024)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
For Devs/Engineers and even many designers, things some of us tend to take for granted were amazing to them. So, my first recommendation is to read Refactoring UI end-to-end and keep a copy handy at your desk. https://www.refactoringui.com PS. Refactoring UI is from the guys who created TailwindCSS.
May be it's just me, but the very first example (contacts form) looks better (easier to read) on the left than text in empty space on the right (which is supposed to be the good design)...
It's not just you, I didn't even open the link and know exactly which two examples you're talking about because I left this same comment on HN a while ago.
So much of modern design is fashion yet the designers pretend it isn't. Like it's some scientifically provable truth or axiom that faint lines between list items is "bad".
Re: Design Thinking Books (2024)
#47I'm a dev and recently picked up "The Design of Everyday Things" as an attempt to become more design-oriented. Everyone raves about this being like the bible of design. So far I'm about 80 pages in and have found it extremely academic and not very practical, sometimes deriving conclusions that are so far from reality that they are a bit concerning, like how a strong password does not matter because once they inevitab…
It tells lots of things but you can takeaway a few things.
One of the key takeaway example for me was that if you make an approachable flat surface, people will put things on it. This is a small example but tells a lot about design of common things.
Another was that I shouldn't be blaming myself for failing to use an everyday thing, I should be blaming its design.
After reading the book I now keep seeing so many design flaws in so many things around. It also made me appreciate good design similarly. I probably think a bit more about users of code etc now, doesn't mean I write better, but it has changed perspective quite a bit.
Re: Design Thinking Books (2024)
#48I'm a dev and recently picked up "The Design of Everyday Things" as an attempt to become more design-oriented. Everyone raves about this being like the bible of design. So far I'm about 80 pages in and have found it extremely academic and not very practical, sometimes deriving conclusions that are so far from reality that they are a bit concerning, like how a strong password does not matter because once they inevitab…
I read it and thought it contained several good ideas, but was excessively wordy and would have benefited from being half as long.
Re: Design Thinking Books (2024)
#49Design thinking is a human-centered, iterative approach to creative problem- solving, focusing on deeply understanding users' needs to develop innovative solutions through phases like Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. Apparently. It's not immediately clear how it's different from your good old "regular" design.
It doesn't claim to be different? It puts more emphasis on the design part.
Re: Design Thinking Books (2024)
#50My two cents as a 20 year product manager with +10 enterprise applications under my belt (and having read several of these):
# "Don't make me think" is a seminal work on design thinking for online services. I've yet to come across a book with as much relevance and substance even though it was written for the dot com era.
# "Positioning" by Al Reis is a book I wish I read 15 years ago when I started my company... your product's strategic positioning will greatly inform and shape design decisions (typography, colors, tones, copy, etc)
# "Ogilvy on Advertising" - written by the legend himself, once you read this book, it will change the way you see all ads in any medium