A wonderfully readable field guide to making better designs and getting better end results.
Weigel offers a one-stop guide to improve product design for customers.
In her nonfiction debut, the author, a senior design manager, shares tips and strategies for product development based on the overall framework of “Good Experimental Design,” which she describes as a way to move the whole process “beyondopinion”: “It uses research, A/B testing, and data analysis to create reliable evidence, which enables consistently better decision-making.” Objective evidence is at the heart of what Weigel refers to as “Conversion Design,” which rests on three key elements: Design, Science, and Business. “Accessibilityis if something is possible to do,” she writes; “Usabilityis if something is easy to do.” In these pages, she offers a wide-ranging approach to aligning both. The author covers basic terminology (“contrary to popular belief, the idea behind hypothesis testing is notto prove the alternate hypothesis true,” she writes. “It is to be extremely skeptical of the alternate hypothesis and assume the null hypothesis is true”), explains what makes some experiments effective, and details concepts like controls, randomization, and experimental variables. The book is lavishly illustrated with graphs, charts, colorful visuals, and highlighted insets on subjects such as “Expert advice from the field.” From fundamentals to more specialized topics like work processes and stakeholder responsibilities, Weigel is an energetic, absolutely winning guide. “I’ve lived about a hundred lives in my short time on this planet,” she writes, and readers will believe it—these pages brim with lessons learned from experience and hard-earned wisdom. There’s no such thing as one “right” decision in experimentation, the author cautions, and in the world of Conversion Design, seeming paradoxes abound: Processes can be efficient but not effective, workers can be productive but not efficient, and so on. With tremendous engagement and clarity, Weigel explains it all.
A wonderfully readable field guide to making better designs and getting better end results.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781959029373
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Two Waves Books
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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