UX Book Club Review

We held our first UX Book Club this week at Wilde Roast coffee house in Minneapolis, MN. It was a small but extremely engaged group.

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Our book was Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton. Something that we all found amusing, was that only one participant finished reading the entire book. Most everyone got through the first part of the book, but stalled a bit when they hit the examples. We brought up some really good points in the book, but felt it wasn’t broken down enough to be useful for practitioners to share it up the management chain. There was one page that was useful for that, several of us felt the first page of the book was really the crux of the entire issue when it comes to the struggles we have working in UX, an executive level notion of design leadership within an organization.

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We thought maybe the book could be split in two — one part for management and strategists, and the other for designers. There were techniques illustrated in the 2nd half of the book would be good reference for designers, but the material was really contextual. Additionally some ideas require more time, or are things that practitioner level people have little control over influencing, but are good ideas to note.

A couple of other books came up during the conversation. We felt The book “Back of the Napkin” provides a briefer example of how to use the sketching techniques described by Buxton. It’s also more accessible and immediate. The Buxton material is a bit more dense. Many agreed that Ginny Redish’s book is a good, handy reference and another favorite book that came up was Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think”. Both books are simple, brief, straight-forward and extremely USEFUL.

There was also a brief discussion around the intersection of BA’s and IA’s, and earlier this week someone had posted the site http://www.catalyze.org as a great resource around that intersection.

We did a drawing for a $50 Wilde Roast gift certificate sponsored by Gumption, LLC. Larisa Brandt was our big winner.

Upcoming Events:

  • Join us for the next regular UX Meetup on March 9th from 6-8 at Wilde Roast and bring your business card for a chance to win the drawing which will be sponsored by Evantage.
  • Join us for our next UX Book Club on April 13th from 6-8 at Wilde Roast. Stephanie is the official book facilitator for April and she decided the next book will be “Designing the Obvious”.