Labs Library: Essential Reading List
It’s been a while since our last edition of Labs Library, in which we strive to keep you informed on the latest writing in the industry.
What better way to refresh than to bring you the books our team just can’t live without and most commonly recommend. So make some room on the bookshelf and keep your eyes peeled for future Labs reviews!
Good Services
By Lou Downe
Receiving numerous votes from our team – thanks to Senior Researcher Michael Sabo for nominating. An all round classic which sets out solid principles that should be considered when designing customer centered services.
Next up, 3 for 1 from Snr Director of Service Design Marise Phillips, who nominates her go-to’s:
This is Service Design Thinking
By Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider
Hugely popular among our team – this great introduction to the fundamentals of service design feature contributions from the global service design community, as well as practical tools to put service design thinking into action.
Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Design Decision Making Sessions
By Sam Kaner
From how to design meetings to common facilitator challenges – this handbook is packed full of models and tools to enable effective group decision making within your organization or community.
Business Model Generation
By Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
Authored by Osterwalder and Pigneur and co-created by 470 practitioners worldwide, this highly visual book provides practical models for applying a business model canvas to improve the business model of an organization, as used by the world’s leading brands.
Rocket Surgery Made Easy
By Steve Krug
Put forward by Senior Researcher Lee Kile – “Steve does a great job of demystifying usability testing and offers common sense approaches to testing that are surprisingly scalable”.
User Friendly
By Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant
A book that’s more a historical than instructional read and a must for anyone interested in design. Principal Researcher James Heaney recommends this title, which weaves a surprisingly compelling account of the development of UX design and research.
Just Enough Research
By Erika Hall
And finally a recommendation from Senior Researcher Laura Donohue and another firm favorite in the Labs. In Laura’s own words “it’s a fantastic primer on running research that breaks everything down in an easily understandable way.”
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We hope you enjoyed our selections, stay tuned for future round ups from the team.
And if you’re reading this – you might want to know more about how we apply similar frameworks for our clients. Head over to Our Work to learn more.
All images: Sutherland Labs.
The Labs Team
