Universal Methods of Design: 100 Ways to Research Complex Problems, Develop Innovative Ideas, and Design Effective Solutions Hardcover – February 1, 2012

Need this for my ongoing graduate studies and I love this book. There are no "oh great filler" pages, it gets straight to the point, it's not so big that you're cursing out the physical dimensions of the book, and works great with sticky notes. And truly there are so many choices for research methods, you're going to want sticky notes. The author does a wonderful job at describing those methods too, so you're not staring at a wall going, "what did I just read?"

As a user experience designer with 10 years of experience and clients like National Geographic, Stephen Hawking, Best Buy, Bon Iver, and Harvard University, I have experience with nearly every method described in this book. Yet when I pack up to go to work or consulting gigs or client meetings or lectures or workshops, this is the first book that goes into my bag before I leave home. When I'm not carrying it with me it is usually still close at hand. There are many more inspiring, industry-changing texts on the market, but Universal Methods of Design is simply the most valuable book in my day-to-day practice.I thought of saying that this book is to user-centered designers what Strunk's Elements of Style is to writers, but the analogy isn't quite right. Writers generally know the best practices for semicolon usage and unordered list formatting. In contrast, most people that claim the title "user experience designer" still spend the majority of their time wireframing or designing in Photoshop. It's really not your fault, it is ours; the UX community has done very little to help educate entering UX professionals, so you have likely never been exposed to most of the methods detailed in this text. You don't know how powerful a simple technique like Affinity Mapping can be, or how the investment in LEGO's Serious Play products can yield a hundred-fold return, or how an absurd hour spent writing love letters and hate letters to yourself can significantly improve a product. But for the aspiring UX designer, this book is an essential introduction to the methods used in professional experience design projects.For those of us that have experience with these design methods: we all have dealt with those challenging projects, difficult stakeholders, or unique product requirements that seem to exhaust our standard design toolbox. Those situations where our usual methods for scoping, defining, researching, modeling, prototyping, producing, and testing seem inadequate. In these situations, there is no better reference than what Hanington and Martin have put together in this book. Buy it, and if you are underwhelmed then I'll buy you a drink and let you hassle me about it when I see you at the next conference.

Overall this is a gorgeous & well-organized book of design/usability research techniques, presented alphabetically as well as with numeric hints indicating which are best suited to different phases of a project. I'm really looking fwd to reading the rest of the techniques once I locate a magnifying glass ;)This is a nice hardcover book with an attractive, modern design that presents the one quibble I have so far: I find the text too small & too light, making it very hard to read. The body text is only maybe 8-9pt, and is light-middle gray in color. On white pages it is tiring to look at, and the amount of whitespace on many pages indicates they probably could've bumped up the font size juuust a tad. I had to hold the book practically up to my nose to read the first few pages (I'm early 30s & have 20/20 vision). On the whole it's an attractive design & would be a great ebook, but for the sake of legibility and usability (ironically...) it might be better w larger, darker type. The magnifying glass on the cover may actually be a suggestion. Still, the quality is great & so is the content thus far - just having to work for it a bit too much.

This is a reference book and a survey book, of one hundred current methods in design research methodology, for the fitting of a product, service or system to a user, client or customer population. The survey and the text are the product of the superb learning and research environment for these methods at Carnegie Mellon University.Methods are listed in alphabetic order. Each is given a two page treatment; one page of text and another of figures and diagram. URLs, standard reference sources are conveniently listed on the same page, and not in an index at the back of the text. The treatment of these diverse methods in identical format makes a cross comparison of methods simple and fast. Further, an indication is given (an index of 1 through 5) of whether the method is useful at the early or the late phases of the research process so that methods can be compared within phase-catagories.The format and page layout in the hard-copy version are such that moving between methods, and cross comparing methods will be easier in the paper format than in the electronic. At the bargain price of 24 USD this is both an affordable and very complete aid to current best practices in design survey methodology.