Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is a very popular framing technique with about 25 years which has been adopted by the UX area in recent years.

Jim Kalbach presents a technical approach adapted to the reality of UX professionals. It consists in understanding which are the users’ real needs and motivations. It defends a greater focus, not so much on the product or service, but on the users and on what they want to achieve by purchasing it.

Chris Avore & Russ Unger present a guide for design leaders with detailed and practical advice about how to run a design team, from hiring to integrating and nurturing.

Being leaders of design teams themselves, they present their perspective based on their long personal experience, but also the perspective of other design leaders and other industries.

We often receive information we don’t understand and in a way that makes no sense to us, from privacy policies to medical explanations. From this idea, Stephen Anderson and Karl Fast try to answer the book’s central question - “how does understanding takes place?”

To answer the question, the authors talk about how we understand by associations, with external representations and through interactions and present tools and technologies for facilitating understanding.

Without any content, websites and apps would be just a series of meaningless shapes and icons. The design of digital products depends on the words, whether in buttons, menus or error messages. Words that users interact with and that influence their experience.

That’s exactly why the authors focus on the importance of writing in the creation of interfaces and on how words shape design. Content must be created as the rest of the experience is developed, in an iterative process and validated with research, since its main goal is helping users complete all necessary tasks.

We naturally let ourselves be guided by cognitive bias and irrational forces that shape our everyday decisions. The author tries to understand the logic powering those forces, the bias that affect users and how they make unconscious decisions, in order to help us make design and content choices that will help mitigate cognitive bias and use it for good.

Civic tech is a movement that brings together the strengths of the private sector tech world to public entities with the aim of making government more responsive, efficient, modern and just.

Based on her working experience, Cyd Harrel wrote this practical guide for technology people who work or want to work in the public sector. It includes practical advice on how to build alliances with public-sector partners, which skills are more useful, and how to work in spaces dedicated to stewardship rather than profit.

Cheryl starts by explaining the concept of multimodal experience - experiences that can engage multiple human senses, like speak or touch to make a selection. She teaches different techniques to build fluid, adaptive experiences for multiple inputs, outputs and devices. She also talks about specific types of artificial intelligence driven input and output.

Topics like accessibility and inclusive design are also covered throughout different chapters of the book.

This book is a manual and a toolkit to help you express your most creative self. Based on neuroscience, mindfulness practices and self-comparison research, Denise shows how to identify and quiet the voice of self-sabotage in your head, master power practices to transform how you relate to yourself and your creativity, how to generate more ideas and much more.

Everything we use was designed by someone. Some got it right while others not so much. Scott Berkun teaches us what good design is and why it’s so important, how our lives are defined by designs made by others, and how to ask better questions of everything we buy, use and make.

With technology becoming deeply integrated into every aspect of our lives, we expect more emotionally intelligent interactions. Pamela explains how with a mix of design thinking, mixed methods research and emotion tech it’s possible to bend our current practices toward emotional intelligence. She also shows us how design can help promote emotional well-being.