I know it is more niche to the online/websites POV, but “Don’t Make Me Think” is a book that needs to be somewhere in the lines of “The Design of Everyday Things.” Of course, I re-read the latter as reminders and catch-up readings.
I like how the author correctly shown the cover image for the "The Sciences of the Artificial", with plural 's' in 'sciences', but then in the paragraph praising it gleefully ignored it.
Thanks, I will fix this one. And yes, I am an old guy who doesn’t use AI in writing my articles. I tried once, and I felt like I was a slave to the machine ;) So, I am proud of my human mistakes in the age of AI perfection.
Tom Kelley and David Kelley, founders of Stanford's Design School and IDEO (the industrial design firm that made things like Apple's first mouse and the standup toothpaste tube) have a great book, Creative Confidence.
I'm a dev and recently picked up "The Design of Everyday Things" as an attempt to become more design-oriented. Everyone raves about this being like the bible of design.
So far I'm about 80 pages in and have found it extremely academic and not very practical, sometimes deriving conclusions that are so far from reality that they are a bit concerning, like how a strong password does not matter because once they inevitably leak they can always be cracked via rainbow tables (the author doesn't use this exact term). As we know the exact point of a strong password is that it will not be in a rainbow table.
Of course the original version is pretty old but I picked up the latest revised version. Still some interesting insights and I haven't given up on the book quite yet but it's been a ton of theory and a lot of terminology so far.
Still more on the psychological and even philosophical side than being about how to do design, I really enjoyed Jenny Davis, "How artifacts afford" (2020). It takes consideration of 'affordance' to a new level. If that rings bells, you'll love it.
That point about rainbow tables seems to ignore how modern hashing works. We use salted hashes (bcrypt, Argon2) specifically to render rainbow tables ineffective. Since the salt is unique per user, pre-computing tables isn't feasible, so a strong password absolutely still matters against brute-forcing the specific hash.
Design Thinking is a subset of Systems Thinking (this is the polite interpretation).
Design Thinking does with its sole existence what Systems Thinking tried to avoid: Another category to put stuff into, divide and conquer. It is an over-simplified version of the original theories.
Better: Jump directly to Systems Thinking, Cybernetics and Systems Theory (and if measurements are more your thing, even try System Dynamics).
I can only recommend that anyone interested in this topic take a look at the work of one of the masters of Systems Thinking, Russel Ackoff:
This talk from 1991 is several dozen books heavily condensed into one hour.
(Russell Ackoff is considered one of the founders of Operations Research and ironically came to be regarded an apostate as he tried to reform the field he co-founded. He subsequently became a prominent figure of Systems Thinking)
I've been very interested in cybernetics and systems thinking lately — would you be able to recommend some good books? I'm not afraid of difficult academic or philosophical reading, but I'm looking for stuff that's large in scope, applies to general fields, etc.
Design thinking is a human-centered, iterative approach to creative problem-
solving, focusing on deeply understanding users' needs to develop innovative
solutions through phases like Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.
Apparently. It's not immediately clear how it's different from your good old "regular" design.
I was confused when I first heard about 'Design Thinking' as a thing because as a designer it sounded just like the standard design process that I already knew inside-out and backwards.
After a while I realised a few things about it:
1. Yes it is the standard design process, but with a fancy title.
2. It's been given a fancy title as that helps sell books and launch consulting careers
3. It's actually useful as it gets clients and stakeholders involved in the design process. They start thinking about the problems they want to solve and who they want to solve them for - and more importantly have a personal stake in the outcomes. Moves the conversation from 'I want this' to 'here's the problem'.
I've run design thinking workshops with everyone from primary school children to CEOs and they've all loved it.
My two cents as a 20 year product manager with +10 enterprise applications under my belt (and having read several of these):
# "Don't make me think" is a seminal work on design thinking for online services. I've yet to come across a book with as much relevance and substance even though
it was written for the dot com era.
# "Positioning" by Al Reis is a book I wish I read 15 years ago when I started my company... your product's strategic positioning will greatly inform and shape design decisions (typography, colors, tones, copy, etc)
# "Ogilvy on Advertising" - written by the legend himself, once you read this book, it will change the way you see all ads in any medium
It seems that I have learned to distrust websites that show ads.
I don't think there's nothing wrong with wanting to get paid via ads. But I don't see why a list of "design thinking" books should be some piece of info that you should be paid for.
Design Thinking is the Data Science of UX: an attempt to gain influence in fields that you don't have expertise in.
Even though there might be universal design principle that can be applied in many fields, the Design Thinking people think that they can just come in and design user interfaces, etc. without really having an expertise in the particular field.
Design Thinking works for selling consulting and not much else. Nobody wants another Agile(TM) process imposed on software developers (in my particular case) that attempts to turn developers into factory line workers.
Design thinking, at least in its formal STS approach, is essentially applied sociology; it's about using various toolkits to build a sufficient understanding of a domain from the "inside out" (using desk and field research) so that you can design valuable experiences that build upon the expertise of those actually inside the domain. In this, it's a bridge between UX/product and users/stakeholders (technical stakeholders are admittedly too often an afterthought, but that's a process problem). If anyone comes in and attempts to blindly shove workshops at you without first conducting in-depth research, interviews, and field studies in your domain, then they are (without resorting to the One True Scotsman) not doing design thinking, they're doing cargo-cult brainstorming. (It's also a process orthogonal to agile development, since by definition it's a linear process that needs to be conducted prior to developing the actual product features and requirements.)
The books and papers the OP cites are solid (Rittel and Webber, Buchanan, etc., though TRIZ, I think, is rather oversold), but in my experience the problem with most design thinking practitioners is that they aren't qualified sociologists and ethnographers, so a lot of design thinking is basically a reinvention of the last century of sociological middle-range theory and ethnographic principles, without being strongly informed by either, likely due to the field's foundation in early software requirements studies.
These are good points. Although I discussed the TRIZ in couple of my articles. I need to revisit my thoughts as it is over-egineered Russian tool that eliminate all the benefits of subjective constructivism design mindset. It is simply say, everything can be solved using one fo those 40 ways.
Not sure what your definition of 'Design Thinking' is.
Design Thinking isn't about people thinking "that they can just come in and design user interfaces, etc. without really having an expertise in the particular field."
It's a problem solving approach using UCD methods amongst others and working with experts in the field to come up with solutions and ideas to a given problem space.
Key thing is you work with the people who are experts in the field, for example working with medical experts to design a new health related application etc.
Having read the other comments in reply to this one (and your subsequent replies) - I believe you might be falling into a "No True Scotsman" situation.
First of - I don't know what circles you've been around, but I've not been in work collectives where either designers, UX-ers or data scientists try to insert themselves to do things instead of software engineers. If anything, in any collective I worked in, if a software engineer was to say a peep everyone would retreat like there's no tomorrow and thank god that they don't have to deal with it and the software engineer will.
Secondly - I think you are mistaking a structuring and outlining of a process with that being a mandate or an order to follow the process. When I work with software engineers, I expect them to be agile - not to follow an agile process, but to achieve the objectives of the agile manifesto - namely, to iterate ruthlessly, keep an eye on usage signals and lead with MVP's rather than over-design. Good software engineers do that, bad software engineers don't. Ultimately, I don't even judge software engineers by that - I judge them by the ability to produce results.
I think the implication of your thinking is that this is all nonsense because software engineers innately solve data science problems and design thinking problems when appropriate with appropriate methods - to which I'd reply - there's a shocking amount of software engineers who can't do anything with data and are useless in fitting a linear regression to predict something, let alone doing a Fourier transform - to which, presumably, your response would be "No true software engineer is like that". That's great, but it's not true in the real world. Same with design thinking - there's software engineers who just can't solve problems from first principles (but can, say, create a fail-proof CRUD app to automate a business process).
The real world is messy and full of people who can't structure their thoughts, or can't structure them in all domains at the least - and things like design thinking - or generalists who can be thrown at any data problem and produce something (i.e. data scientists) - are useful. They're not the best solution always, sure, and if they start being protective of territory - it's a problem - but in a normal collective that doesn't happen.
Basically - your objection can be boiled down to "generalists are shit, because they impose process on everyone, including people who understand the domain better" - which tells me more about the collectives you've worked in than the nature of those jobs. In every collective I've worked in, generalists are what you throw at an ambiguous problem to produce some results before you get domain specialists in.
You have a veyr good point here. Sadly many people try to sell design thinking as a product without digging into its underpinning philosophy at all. This is driven by many business and egineering schools that tend to turn it into a creativity-making machine. Again sadly, it doesn't work. In order to benefit from design thinking, it is important look at it from the perspective of problem framing before the solution framing. You can check the Frame Innovation by Kees Dorst, who is built on the philosophy of Thomas Khun.
Another thing is that design thinking is sold as a process where we as desigenrs never think this way. The IDEO drove this approach to make it easy to understand. This is why I teach my students that design is an arena where all the factors and stages blend. You can check the last paper in the article about the Memoranda and Artfect as it sreflects on other proceeses such as the Agile.
What most people fail to realise is something quite simple about “design” - it’s the discipline of bridging human behaviour and “things” (be that objects or software).
Don Norman’s book covers a lot on human behaviour, which is the correct lens through which to view “design”.
I’m not a game designer, but 15 years after initially reading it, Jesse Schell’s “The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses” really sticks with me in any product design context. Organizing your thoughts around the lenses presented in this book makes for productive discussion, and can turn subjective points (an example might be how frictionless or not a UI element might be) into more objective points. I suggest checking it out. The author posted a deck of the lenses here: https://deck.artofgamedesign.com
If anyone's interested in how environment shapes behavior: I wrote "Leave the Door Open." It's about designing spaces that reduce isolation and relax the nervous system.
Based on research like the Rat Park experiments showing environment beats willpower. Practical room-by-room changes.
The Substack for Open Enough Design is here: https://OEDmethod.substack.com and you can find a link to the book there too.
Design thinking is a scam. I once had to took part in a design thinking class (my company wanted that). The consultant clearly were just waiting to see what kind of ideas we would come up with for some product. If an interesting idea came up in their classes they would later try to monetize it. So basically you pay them so they get your product ideas for free.
40 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 73.8 ms ] threadI've been curating (mostly design) books on a digital library: https://links.1984.design/books
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Make_Me_Think
Probably means this article wasn't written by AI!
Here's their website for the book, along with some tools and useful instructional videos https://www.creativeconfidence.com/tools/
So far I'm about 80 pages in and have found it extremely academic and not very practical, sometimes deriving conclusions that are so far from reality that they are a bit concerning, like how a strong password does not matter because once they inevitably leak they can always be cracked via rainbow tables (the author doesn't use this exact term). As we know the exact point of a strong password is that it will not be in a rainbow table.
Of course the original version is pretty old but I picked up the latest revised version. Still some interesting insights and I haven't given up on the book quite yet but it's been a ton of theory and a lot of terminology so far.
Design Thinking is a subset of Systems Thinking (this is the polite interpretation). Design Thinking does with its sole existence what Systems Thinking tried to avoid: Another category to put stuff into, divide and conquer. It is an over-simplified version of the original theories.
Better: Jump directly to Systems Thinking, Cybernetics and Systems Theory (and if measurements are more your thing, even try System Dynamics).
I can only recommend that anyone interested in this topic take a look at the work of one of the masters of Systems Thinking, Russel Ackoff:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9p6vrULecFI
This talk from 1991 is several dozen books heavily condensed into one hour.
(Russell Ackoff is considered one of the founders of Operations Research and ironically came to be regarded an apostate as he tried to reform the field he co-founded. He subsequently became a prominent figure of Systems Thinking)
My 2c. I'll show myself out.
After a while I realised a few things about it:
1. Yes it is the standard design process, but with a fancy title.
2. It's been given a fancy title as that helps sell books and launch consulting careers
3. It's actually useful as it gets clients and stakeholders involved in the design process. They start thinking about the problems they want to solve and who they want to solve them for - and more importantly have a personal stake in the outcomes. Moves the conversation from 'I want this' to 'here's the problem'.
I've run design thinking workshops with everyone from primary school children to CEOs and they've all loved it.
GTFO with this hyperbolic language
It's a very light, approachable book, dealing with surprisingly universal principles. Also it has very nice pictures.
Most of it also applies to game dev, and to the design of experiences.
# "Don't make me think" is a seminal work on design thinking for online services. I've yet to come across a book with as much relevance and substance even though it was written for the dot com era.
# "Positioning" by Al Reis is a book I wish I read 15 years ago when I started my company... your product's strategic positioning will greatly inform and shape design decisions (typography, colors, tones, copy, etc)
# "Ogilvy on Advertising" - written by the legend himself, once you read this book, it will change the way you see all ads in any medium
I don't think there's nothing wrong with wanting to get paid via ads. But I don't see why a list of "design thinking" books should be some piece of info that you should be paid for.
At least there's an author to the article I guess
Even though there might be universal design principle that can be applied in many fields, the Design Thinking people think that they can just come in and design user interfaces, etc. without really having an expertise in the particular field.
Design Thinking works for selling consulting and not much else. Nobody wants another Agile(TM) process imposed on software developers (in my particular case) that attempts to turn developers into factory line workers.
The books and papers the OP cites are solid (Rittel and Webber, Buchanan, etc., though TRIZ, I think, is rather oversold), but in my experience the problem with most design thinking practitioners is that they aren't qualified sociologists and ethnographers, so a lot of design thinking is basically a reinvention of the last century of sociological middle-range theory and ethnographic principles, without being strongly informed by either, likely due to the field's foundation in early software requirements studies.
SOC2 is like this: a collection of security ideas thought up by a group of CPAs, so they can partake in software engineering. It's beyond bizarre.
- Gandhi
Design Thinking isn't about people thinking "that they can just come in and design user interfaces, etc. without really having an expertise in the particular field."
It's a problem solving approach using UCD methods amongst others and working with experts in the field to come up with solutions and ideas to a given problem space.
Key thing is you work with the people who are experts in the field, for example working with medical experts to design a new health related application etc.
First of - I don't know what circles you've been around, but I've not been in work collectives where either designers, UX-ers or data scientists try to insert themselves to do things instead of software engineers. If anything, in any collective I worked in, if a software engineer was to say a peep everyone would retreat like there's no tomorrow and thank god that they don't have to deal with it and the software engineer will.
Secondly - I think you are mistaking a structuring and outlining of a process with that being a mandate or an order to follow the process. When I work with software engineers, I expect them to be agile - not to follow an agile process, but to achieve the objectives of the agile manifesto - namely, to iterate ruthlessly, keep an eye on usage signals and lead with MVP's rather than over-design. Good software engineers do that, bad software engineers don't. Ultimately, I don't even judge software engineers by that - I judge them by the ability to produce results.
I think the implication of your thinking is that this is all nonsense because software engineers innately solve data science problems and design thinking problems when appropriate with appropriate methods - to which I'd reply - there's a shocking amount of software engineers who can't do anything with data and are useless in fitting a linear regression to predict something, let alone doing a Fourier transform - to which, presumably, your response would be "No true software engineer is like that". That's great, but it's not true in the real world. Same with design thinking - there's software engineers who just can't solve problems from first principles (but can, say, create a fail-proof CRUD app to automate a business process).
The real world is messy and full of people who can't structure their thoughts, or can't structure them in all domains at the least - and things like design thinking - or generalists who can be thrown at any data problem and produce something (i.e. data scientists) - are useful. They're not the best solution always, sure, and if they start being protective of territory - it's a problem - but in a normal collective that doesn't happen.
Basically - your objection can be boiled down to "generalists are shit, because they impose process on everyone, including people who understand the domain better" - which tells me more about the collectives you've worked in than the nature of those jobs. In every collective I've worked in, generalists are what you throw at an ambiguous problem to produce some results before you get domain specialists in.
Another thing is that design thinking is sold as a process where we as desigenrs never think this way. The IDEO drove this approach to make it easy to understand. This is why I teach my students that design is an arena where all the factors and stages blend. You can check the last paper in the article about the Memoranda and Artfect as it sreflects on other proceeses such as the Agile.
Don Norman’s book covers a lot on human behaviour, which is the correct lens through which to view “design”.
Based on research like the Rat Park experiments showing environment beats willpower. Practical room-by-room changes.
The Substack for Open Enough Design is here: https://OEDmethod.substack.com and you can find a link to the book there too.