User experience (UX) strategy requires a careful blend of business strategy and UX design, but until now, there hasn’t been an easy-to-apply framework for executing it. This hands-on guide introduces lightweight strategy tools and techniques to help you and your team craft innovative multi-device products that people want to use. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, UX/UI designer, product manager, or part of an intrapreneurial team, this book teaches simple-to-advanced strategies that you can use in your work right away. Along with business cases, historical context, and real-world examples throughout, you’ll also gain different perspectives on the subject through interviews with top strategists. Define and validate your target users through provisional personas and customer discovery techniques Conduct competitive research and analysis to explore a crowded marketplace or an opportunity to create unique value Focus your team on the primary utility and business model of your product by running structured experiments using prototypes Devise UX funnels that increase customer engagement by mapping desired user actions to meaningful metrics

An updated guide to designing buildings that heat with the sun, cool with the wind, and light with the sky. This fully updated Third Edition covers principles of designing buildings that use the sun for heating, wind for cooling, and daylight for natural lighting. Using hundreds of illustrations, this book offers practical strategies that give the designer the tools they need to make energy efficient buildings. Hundreds of illustrations and practical strategies give the designer the tools they need to make energy efficient buildings. Organized to quickly guide the designer in making buildings respond to the sun, wind and light.

If You Don’t Define Your Brand, Someone Else Will Define It for You Your small business is a brand. You as a business person are a brand! Imagine using a time-tested,strategic method to build your brandwith best practices for online marketing and more! Brand and marketing strategist Karen Tiber Leland helps entrepreneurs, business owners, CEOs, and executives create a brand by design instead of default, gain greater influence in their industries and companies, and become thought leaders in their fields. The Brand Mapping Strategy uses proven strategies, best practices and anecdotes from real life brand-building successes to give readers the tools they need to design, build, and accelerate a successful brand. Readers will be able to: Develop an overall blueprint for their brand using the Brand Mapping Process® Determine which online tactics (and in what combination) will work for their brand Expand the current brand outreach and contribution to a bigger audience in their industry, community, or the world at large Become a thought or industry leader, using clear positioning, a specific strategy for brand building, and a method for implementation Leverage content effectively and efficiently to build their brand Develop a marketing and social media strategy using the right platform

Customers who have inconsistent, broken experiences with products and services are understandably frustrated. But it’s worse when people inside these companies can’t pinpoint the problem because they’re too focused on business processes. This practical book shows your company how to use alignment diagrams to turn valuable customer observations into actionable insight. With this unique tool, you can visually map your existing customer experience and envision future solutions. Product and brand managers, marketing specialists, and business owners will learn how experience diagramming can help determine where business goals and customer perspectives intersect. Once you’re armed with this data, you can provide users with real value. Mapping Experiences is divided into three parts: Understand the underlying principles of diagramming, and discover how these diagrams can inform strategy Learn how to create diagrams with the four iterative modes in the mapping process: setting up a mapping initiative, investigating the evidence, visualizing the process, and using diagrams in workshops and experiments See key diagrams in action, including service blueprints, customer journey maps, experience maps, mental models, and spatial maps and ecosystem models

Mapping methods are used by teams to develop strategy to assist a wide variety of activities. Mapping methods are particularly useful for: Making informed design decisions Identify areas of opportunity for developing new products, services and experiences Analyzing a competitive landscape To understand trends To analyze complex, changing and ambiguous design problems Look for areas where there are ideal factors to support a product or service. Look for areas without competitive rivals Enable meaningful conversations about difficult design topics Use real-time information to help identify potential problems and make the best decisions Create design that has a better return on investment Understand your customer's perspectives Create more successful design. Mapping methods can be applied to support informed design decisions as part of a Design Thinking approach to design. Design Thinking is an approach to designing products, services, architecture, spaces and experiences that is being quickly adopted by designers, architects and some of the world's leading brands such as GE, Target, SAP, Procter and Gamble, IDEO and Intuit. It is being taught at leading universities including Stanford and Harvard. Design Thinking creates practical and innovative solutions to problems. It drives repeatable innovation and business value. Design Thinking can be used to develop a wide range of products, services, experiences and strategy. It is an approach that can be applied by anyone. This book is an indispensable reference guide for: Architects, industrial designers, interior designers, UX and web designers, service designers, exhibit designers, design educators and students, visual communication designers, packaging and fashion designers, all types of designers Engineers and Marketing professionals Executives and senior business leaders Decision makers in R&D of products, services, systems and experiences School teachers and school students

What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today's high-stakes, standards-based environment? Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe answer these and many other questions in this second edition of Understanding by Design. Drawing on feedback from thousands of educators around the world who have used the UbD framework since its introduction in 1998, the authors have greatly revised and expanded their original work to guide educators across the K-16 spectrum in the design of curriculum, assessment, and instruction. With an improved UbD Template at its core, the book explains the rationale of backward design and explores in greater depth the meaning of such key ideas as essential questions and transfer tasks. Readers will learn why the familiar coverage- and activity-based approaches to curriculum design fall short, and how a focus on the six facets of understanding can enrich student learning. With an expanded array of practical strategies, tools, and examples from all subject areas, the book demonstrates how the research-based principles of Understanding by Design apply to district frameworks as well as to individual units of curriculum. Combining provocative ideas, thoughtful analysis, and tested approaches, this new edition of Understanding by Design offers teacher-designers a clear path to the creation of curriculum that ensures better learning and a more stimulating experience for students and teachers alike.

User story mapping is a valuable tool for software development, once you understand why and how to use it. This insightful book examines how this often misunderstood technique can help your team stay focused on users and their needs without getting lost in the enthusiasm for individual product features. Author Jeff Patton shows you how changeable story maps enable your team to hold better conversations about the project throughout the development process. Your team will learn to come away with a shared understanding of what you’re attempting to build and why. Get a high-level view of story mapping, with an exercise to learn key concepts quickly Understand how stories really work, and how they come to life in Agile and Lean projects Dive into a story’s lifecycle, starting with opportunities and moving deeper into discovery Prepare your stories, pay attention while they’re built, and learn from those you convert to working software