Lately I've become a big fan of the series of books by A Book Apart. So far I've read two of them — Luke Wroblewski's Mobile First and Aarron Walter's Designing for Emotion — and I bought Mike Montiero's Design is a Job and gave it to my boss to read. Also, excited about Karen McGrane's Content Strategy for Mobile.
What I love about these books is that they skip all the obligatory "what else can we put in here to make this 'book sized'" content that continually haunts tech and design books. For example, O'Reilly's Mobile Design & Development spends the first 41 pages discussing "A Brief History of Mobile" and "Why Mobile"... I don't know for sure, but I'd think if you're someone buying and reading this book, you probably already know something about the history of mobile, and you certainly don't need to be convinced that you should be thinking about designing for mobile. Probably 4 out of 5 design or technology books I read involves skipping over a big chunk of the beginning of the book. And these books are advertised *for* design professionals, not newbies or dabblers. What's going on here?
I think there's a couple things. One, as discussed, the publishing industry is so used to a certain "size" of physical book that authors and editors try and force a bunch of content into their writing in order to prove that it really is a "book." This issue will probably subside as ebooks become more popular.
The other issue that might be going on, however, is a bit more nuanced. I think that book authors often don't go through the UX exercise of really thinking about and researching their audience and who they're writing for. It's more like "hey, I have a bunch of knowledge about this topic. I'll put it into a book!" Lately I read (admittedly, only the first part) Gerald Zaltman's How Customers Think. In this book, Zaltman seems to be speaking to an audience of people who are not only largely ignorant of the topic he's speaking of, but actively disagree with his theories. I found myself wondering, would this "persona" that Zaltman is speaking to really buy this book and read it? Perhaps so - perhaps there are business folks out there that are potentially antagonistic toward his theories but interested and would read the book. But I got the feeling that Zaltman had not really thought it through - he was just arguing his point with an imaginary user (reader) who epitomized all the annoying people he'd had to convince about his theories in his lifetime. This didn't work for me because I didn't identify at all with his imaginary reader - I already agreed with a lot of the things he had to say.
The publishers at A Book Apart, however, obviously have thought quite a bit about their users. Their tagline exactly describes who they want to speak to - "Brief books for people who make websites." They obviously have a persona in their minds of a web professional who wants to get the most out of their reading experience and to be efficient. On their "About" page they say "The goal of every title in our catalog is to shed clear light on a tricky subject, and do it fast, so you can get back to work."
I think UX strategies like User Experience Research, Persona creation, and Testing could be an extremely useful tool for authors. First, identify the type(s) of readers you're trying to target. Then, send out surveys or conduct interviews where you get at what these folks already know and what they'd like to learn more about in the space you're writing. Out of this research, create Personas describing their knowledge level, their goals, and anything else about their personality or lifestyle that could help you hone your writing. Finally, send your drafts out to these "target users" and conduct testing. How does the writing make them feel? Are they annoyed? Happy? Are they learning sufficiently? I think there's probably lots more that one could do here, but there's a start. :)
In the end, if someone's writing as a design and UX expert, I'll trust them more if they've done some UX research themselves.
What I love about these books is that they skip all the obligatory "what else can we put in here to make this 'book sized'" content that continually haunts tech and design books. For example, O'Reilly's Mobile Design & Development spends the first 41 pages discussing "A Brief History of Mobile" and "Why Mobile"... I don't know for sure, but I'd think if you're someone buying and reading this book, you probably already know something about the history of mobile, and you certainly don't need to be convinced that you should be thinking about designing for mobile. Probably 4 out of 5 design or technology books I read involves skipping over a big chunk of the beginning of the book. And these books are advertised *for* design professionals, not newbies or dabblers. What's going on here?
I think there's a couple things. One, as discussed, the publishing industry is so used to a certain "size" of physical book that authors and editors try and force a bunch of content into their writing in order to prove that it really is a "book." This issue will probably subside as ebooks become more popular.
The other issue that might be going on, however, is a bit more nuanced. I think that book authors often don't go through the UX exercise of really thinking about and researching their audience and who they're writing for. It's more like "hey, I have a bunch of knowledge about this topic. I'll put it into a book!" Lately I read (admittedly, only the first part) Gerald Zaltman's How Customers Think. In this book, Zaltman seems to be speaking to an audience of people who are not only largely ignorant of the topic he's speaking of, but actively disagree with his theories. I found myself wondering, would this "persona" that Zaltman is speaking to really buy this book and read it? Perhaps so - perhaps there are business folks out there that are potentially antagonistic toward his theories but interested and would read the book. But I got the feeling that Zaltman had not really thought it through - he was just arguing his point with an imaginary user (reader) who epitomized all the annoying people he'd had to convince about his theories in his lifetime. This didn't work for me because I didn't identify at all with his imaginary reader - I already agreed with a lot of the things he had to say.
The publishers at A Book Apart, however, obviously have thought quite a bit about their users. Their tagline exactly describes who they want to speak to - "Brief books for people who make websites." They obviously have a persona in their minds of a web professional who wants to get the most out of their reading experience and to be efficient. On their "About" page they say "The goal of every title in our catalog is to shed clear light on a tricky subject, and do it fast, so you can get back to work."
I think UX strategies like User Experience Research, Persona creation, and Testing could be an extremely useful tool for authors. First, identify the type(s) of readers you're trying to target. Then, send out surveys or conduct interviews where you get at what these folks already know and what they'd like to learn more about in the space you're writing. Out of this research, create Personas describing their knowledge level, their goals, and anything else about their personality or lifestyle that could help you hone your writing. Finally, send your drafts out to these "target users" and conduct testing. How does the writing make them feel? Are they annoyed? Happy? Are they learning sufficiently? I think there's probably lots more that one could do here, but there's a start. :)
In the end, if someone's writing as a design and UX expert, I'll trust them more if they've done some UX research themselves.