A knowledgeable and visually appealing guide to the world of corporate UX intricacies.
Product designer Small offers a handbook for navigating jobs crafting user experience (UX) systems.
This guide looks at the focus areas, responsibilities, and challenges of being a staff designer at all levels of experience in companies of all sizes. She aims her discussion at UX designers at every stage of their career, from newcomers learning the importance of such outward factors as one’s demeanor and bearing to senior practitioners who may be wondering if it’s time to make the transition to project manager. The world of the UX specialty is laid bare in these pages as Small takes readers through the various aspects of the job, from building what she refers to as executive presence (noting that all staff designers are “expected to make a huge impact”) to the vital skill of smart delegation: “Being overwhelmed by your workload isn't a moral failing,” she writes in a sentiment that every harried manager will embrace. “Every designer reaches a point where they have more work than time.” In a series of fast-paced chapters illustrated with charts and tables, the author breaks down such aspects as how to manage one’s time; wrangle the most out of meetings; build a network of “Contributors,” “Observers,” “Approvers,” and “Supporters” (the latter being “Cool folks who don’t directly impact a project but are fun to speak with”); and navigate the intricacies of transitioning from staff design jobs to product management positions. Chapters feature interviews with successful designers, blank workspaces for readers to fill in, sidebar “tips,” and “Catt’s Corner” insets to discuss more specific points. These added bits are often reductive, as when one “tip” informs readers that “most businesses may be small, but they are all unique,” and although “Catt’s Corner” can be engaging, some of her advice may not endear readers to co-workers (such as scheduling meetings according to mood or “energy patterns,” for instance). That said, much of the book’s advice on personal elements is welcome, and its peppy, interactive nature will doubtless help UX practitioners at all stages of their career.
A knowledgeable and visually appealing guide to the world of corporate UX intricacies.Pub Date: yesterday
ISBN: 9781959029779
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Rosenfeld Media
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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