How can design be used to solve business problems? That's the question answered, in many innovative ways, by Building Design Strategy. Mark Dziersk, EunSool Kwon, Arnold Levin, Laura Weiss, and many more top-name contributors share their experience and insights. Topics explore the full range of issues today, including thinking ahead; adapting to challenges; developing tangible strategies; using design to convey ideas; choosing worthwhile projects to help growth; using design to create fiercely loyal customers.

The Business Skills Every Creative Needs! Remaining relevant as a creative professional takes more than creativity--you need to understand the language of business. The problem is that design school doesn't teach the strategic language that is now essential to getting your job done. Creative Strategy and the Business of Design fills that void and teaches left-brain business skills to right-brain creative thinkers. Inside, you'll learn about the business objectives and marketing decisions that drive your creative work. The curtain's been pulled away as marketing-speak and business jargon are translated into tools to help you: Understand client requests from a business perspective Build a strategic framework to inspire visual concepts Increase your relevance in an evolving industry Redesign your portfolio to showcase strategic thinking Win new accounts and grow existing relationships You already have the creativity; now it's time to gain the business insight. Once you understand what the people across the table are thinking, you'll be able to think how they think to do what we do.

This book is packed with strategies and insights that will help you design better training courses. It focuses on how people learn as the key factor in making design decisions. The book shows you how to design a good course for any field, no matter what medium you use to deliver it. Learn how the brain works, how people forget, how to gain and maintain attention and how to make a subject interesting. Then use the easy-to-follow guidelines to design strategically by increasing curiosity, making content emotional, making learners practise what they have learned and using failure as a teaching tool. The art of designing a course and making people learn is mastered through practical experience of running courses; the science is gained by evidence-based research on how people learn. The book combines the two, offering many examples and studies in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, instructional design and training the trainer. You will find lots of examples and studies in the book that provide insights that may not be obvious but that lead to important design decisions. They will change forever how you think about training design and delivery and help you design courses that your learners will love. In Course Design Strategy, you will learn: · How to make content memorable · What learners expect from a course · How people learn and forget, and why this should be the cornerstone of any course design · How to use eureka moments and eureka concepts as the building blocks of course design · How to make content easy to learn · Why the presence of a feedback loop is crucial to learning · How to use exercises and tests to enhance learning

Design management (the management of design strategies, processes and projects) is an intricate subject. As the role of design in the world continues to broaden, organisations are increasingly viewing design as being integral to their decision-making processes. Opening with a contextual overview of the subject, Design Management then explores the stages involved in the application of design to business. Each topic is accompanied by key questions that get the reader to think about the issues raised, and professional case studies and interviews demonstrate the knowledge and practices described. Areas of key practical skills are outlined in order to bridge the gap between creativity management and academic theory, and professional practice.

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

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.

There is no single methodology for creating the perfect product—but you can increase your odds. One of the best ways is to understand users' reasons for doing things. Mental Models gives you the tools to help you grasp, and design for, those reasons. Adaptive Path co-founder Indi Young has written a roll-up-your-sleeves book for designers, managers, and anyone else interested in making design strategic, and successful.