Strategy, discovery, metrics, growth, pricing, design, delivery and leadership. Each entry says when it is the right one to pick up.
Winters established the content design practice at the UK Government Digital Service, and this book sets out the method. Content design starts from a user need and from evidence about what people actually search for, then answers …
Torres describes a specific weekly cadence. You interview customers every week, map the space with an opportunity solution tree, and run small assumption tests against the ideas that tree produces.
The thorough guide to planning and running usability tests, written by two people who have run a great many of them. The first part covers what usability is and where testing fits alongside other methods, and the second walks …
Portigal's book on the craft of the interview itself. Covers preparation and recruiting, building rapport, the structure of a good interview guide, and the specific techniques of silence, follow up and asking for stories.
Hall's guide to doing research yourself rather than outsourcing it. Covers the research basics of asking answerable questions and avoiding bias, then works through organisational research, user research, competitive research, evaluative research and analysis.
Young's method for building a large diagram of what people are trying to accomplish, drawn from transcripts of open ended interviews and grouped into towers of related tasks, thoughts and feelings.
Young separates empathy as a research skill from sympathy and from simply being pleasant, and explains how to build a real understanding of how another person thinks.
A statistics book aimed squarely at people who run user research, organised around the questions that actually come up in the work. It covers confidence intervals for completion rates and task times, comparing two designs, sample …
Spiegelhalter frames statistics as the practice of turning a real question into data and back into an answer, using a problem solving cycle as the spine of the book.
IDEO.org's guide to human centred design, written for people designing with communities rather than for consumer software, and useful well beyond that setting.
A short, practical book on customer conversations. Fitzpatrick's rule is to ask about the person's life and past behaviour rather than about your idea, since the second only produces compliments.
The practical companion to This Is Service Design Thinking, built as a handbook of activities rather than as an argument for the discipline. It covers research, ideation, prototyping, implementation and facilitation, with step by …
A reference of 125 research and design methods, each given a two page spread with a short description, the point in a project where it is useful, and a worked illustration.
Sharon organises the book around the questions product teams ask rather than around research methods. Each chapter takes a question such as who the customers are, what problem is worth solving, whether people want the thing, or …