You Should Write a Book by Katel LeDû and Lisa Maria Marquis

When I first started working in User Experience, my mentors explained to me that part of my responsibility as a designer was to pass on to others what I had learned. My team exemplified that ethic: they were running the IA Summit that year, most of them had given at least one presentation about the things they’d learned at work, and one was writing a book.

“Someday, that will be you,” they said. “You should write a book.”

I was shocked years later to find out that not all UX teams or leaders believed it was our responsibility to pass on what we’d learned. Still, I knew enough people who, like me, felt that passing on our knowledge was one of the responsibilities of a good designer, so I found myself writing a column on a design-related site, then launching my own design-related site with some friends, then giving talks about the things I’m passionate about. But finding time to write a book? Hah.

Now I’m in a situation where the time has been thrust upon me. I don’t particularly like public speaking, and I’d much rather not attend a mess of conferences in our not-quite-post-COVID 19 world. Writing a book seems like a reasonable choice. Still, I am not usually a person to take big risks.

You Should Write a Book by Katel LeDû and Lisa Maria Marquis is a critical book for people like me, who don’t want to move forward without some guideposts and who don’t want to bug their friends for hints or tips.

It does not go into depth about every single step. (There are lots of resources that will provide that for you, and they are dependent on the choices you make on how to write, polish, and publish your book.)

It does give you the map of the process, the understanding of why each of the process steps is there, what differentiates one choice for another, and a pretty deep appendix of next-step sources.

It is also intentionally written to encourage both non-marginalized and marginalized writers. The authors acknowledge in the beginning that they are “college-educated, able-bodied, cis white American women whose direct book-publishing expertise derives mostly from a single organization: A Book Apart. While we hope our perspective is useful, it is also bound to be limited in certain respects.” These authors essentially say that the process for publishing a book is the same for both marginalized and non-marginalized authors, except that that marginalized authors have to do it on hard mode.

This book will not tell you how to choose whether to self-publish or not. It will tell you about self-publishing and what the differences between it and traditional publishing are. It won’t tell you where to find editing or marketing services. It will tell you what they are and why you want them. It won’t tell you what to write about. It won’t tell you what anything costs — those numbers go out of date too quickly anyway. It will gently laugh at you if you think that you can retire on the money from one book.

Because the authors are deeply and intimately familiar with the publishing house A Book Apart, where they both work, they are able to not only give you insights into ABA’s publishing methods but also give you insights from ABA’s authors, who they’ve spoken to about the publishing experience.

In short, all models of the publishing industry are wrong, and this one is useful.

Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood

I’ve know that there is a movement to make the web more sustainable for a while, but Sustainable Web Design, written by Tom Greenwood, is the first book I’ve read about it. I read the book, honestly, because it’s from A Book Apart, and I give pretty much everything they publish a read.

I’m recommending the book, however, because it illustrates that sustainability is one more excellent reason to run an efficient, cleanly-coded, performant website.

An efficient site lets a user do the task they arrived to do in the fewest possible understandable steps, and with the fewest possible distractions.

A cleanly-coded website has less code cruft, takes up less server space, takes up less time to transmit from place to place, and has fewer errors.

A performant website also takes up less server space and less time to transmit from place to place. Additionally, it makes the web feel “snappy” and increases user confidence and satisfaction.

All of those things help us burn less electricity (both as the web consumer and — more importantly — as the web producer), and as a result, increase the sustainability of the internet. Considering that the internet is, as Tom Greenwood puts it, a coal-fired machine, any increase we can make is progress.

Sustainability is important, but sustainability isn’t my passion in UX (at least right now). My passion is seeing that coal-fired machine become more accessible to people with disabilities and users in general.

Turns out that efficiency, clean code, and performance <i>also</i> increase accessibility. Especially when we’re talking about things like “yo how about you remove those eleventy billion javascript frameworks that aren’t accessible, eat a ton of server space, and make loading times agonizing, and try plain static html instead?”

We all have our passions in UX, and that’s good. It helps to keep the larger culture balanced. But it’s also excellent when we can places where our different goals can be met together using common techniques.

Whether you’re passionate about sustainability, accessibility, or just plain great UX, whether your interest is in software, hardware, or managing data centers, whether you are a lifelong tech geek who remembers when everything had to fit on a floppy disk or you’re new to the web and don’t remember a time before Amazon.com, Tom Greenwood’s book will have suggestions for how you can make your products, and our planet, more sustainable. And probably hit a good number of your other life goals on the way.

Presenting Design Work by Donna Spencer

Presenting Design Work by Donna Spencer captures everything I’ve learned about that harrowing process of presenting a web design for review and turned it into a six chapter book you can read over two lunch hours.

I am thrilled that this book emphasizes rigor in the craft of creating and presenting designs.

So many times I’ve sat through reviews where the designer couldn’t tell me what the business problem was, why the user needed the changes, how the user would get from place to place, or what the unhappy paths looked like. They failed to take notes (sometimes showing up without even a note-taking device, like, say, a pencil or a laptop), gave me a tour of our components on the page instead of telling me how someone would use it, and thanked everyone when done — but never followed up to let us know what they’d decided. Then, later, they complained that the product manager steamrolled their input on designs or ignored their feedback.

This book demands a lot of the person who wants to be successful. You have to think about your audience, practice presenting, take notes (or find someone who will), understand the problem you’re building against, understand the feedback you’re given, and be rigorous in your feedback decision-making process.

It also works. It works so very well. And it garners trust between us and our business and engineering peers way better than any less-rigorous process is capable of doing.

As soon as I started reading it, I started messaging people I know mentoring designers and said “yeah this book? this is the one you want.”

Quiet in a time of change

You may have noticed that the site has become… well… UX-related book reviews mostly.

That’s not an accident — I’m reading more than I have in decades, and I do my best to review good books because reviews are a driver for sales, and good authors deserve to be rewarded for being good authors.

But it’s also an acknowledgement that I’m not talking about much else in UX right now. Even on The Interconnected, which is my usual ranting locus, the site was virtually silent last year.

Last year, I think we can all agree, was rough.

This year so far is better but that doesn’t mean much. When I walk the half marathon in Virginia Beach, mile 11 over the damned bridge is hell, but it being stupid hard doesn’t suddenly move the finish line closer.

Still, I think there’s a finish line around the corner, so I shall trudge on until I can fall onto the beach and soak my feet in the ocean.

Things that are looking up:

  • I have a new job at Vertex, Inc. where we design software that calculates sales tax and VAT. I am pro-fair-taxes and also pro-make-taxes-easy, and in a lot of places (for better or worse) sales taxes fund lots of important local initiatives, so at least at the moment it feels like a good fit. I’m two months in and I haven’t seriously pissed anyone off yet, but the day is still young.
  • I’m seeing more and more people in our industry concerned about accessibility and making things more equitable for all, regardless of disability. I refuse to say that the pandemic has any silver linings with 500,000 dead in my country alone. I will say that hard-earned lessons are still lessons, and hopefully we’ll come out of this with more accessible jobs, more accessible websites, and more people giving a damn about their own impacts on their neighbors’ ability to survive in an increasingly technical world.
  • While we’re on the subject of survival, there’ll be a review coming up sometime soon on Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood. I’m about halfway through now and already recommending it to coworkers. Many of the goals in the book align with accessibility goals and good information architecture goals, so I think it could become an asset in convincing our higher-ups (especially in enterprise product design) that good web design = good business, both on the surface and within the code.

I’m also working (slowly) on my own accessibility website, trying to bring together information from the WCAG and the Deque online training classes I’m taking, articles that I rely on, other books, etc.. The ultimate goal is somewhere that people can navigate through a list of components and find something that says “Oh, buttons? Here are all the WCAG guidelines, info on how to hit them, and info on how to test them, all in one place.”

That’s taking longer than I thought it would because

  1. pandemic;
  2. constant exhaustion;
  3. I am the world’s worst estimator.

May you also be within sight of the next milestone, and may your strength hold out until you get there.

Everyday Information Architecture by Lisa Maria Martin

I’m a three-time failure at reading the Polar Bear Book.

I’m also a Principal Information Architect with 10 years’ experience.

I’m not telling you not to read the Polar Bear Book. I am telling you that if you want a short, direct, and well-structured book on what Information Architecture is, how to get started practicing it, and real-world examples of prior work, Everyday Information Architecture by Lisa Maria Martin is the book to start with.

It is the IA cohort to The Elements of Content Strategy And y’all know I’m a big fan of that book.

I started this book while sitting in a hospital room watching my husband sleep. It’s readable even under extreme stress. The book starts with the LATCH system of organization, which I had learned… but when I’d learned it through the quasi-apprenticeship of a mutual fund company’s design department, it didn’t have a name. So here I was, middle of the afternoon, snoring and beeping filling the room, and ten-year veteran of information architecture, learning things I didn’t know on page 5.

Your milage may vary (YMMV), especially if you’re one of those younger folks for whom information architecture degrees were available. (We had library science but I was too short-sighted to major in it.)

The book is vibrant and well-structured enough that I could put it down for a week at a time if I needed to and pick it up again and keep reading and understand where I’d left off. (Also, YMMV.)

Plus, this book isn’t afraid to use Star Trek, Ravelry, cooking, self-deprecating spreadsheet jokes, and colorful, useful examples.

To sum up, this book is going on the list of books anyone who asks me how to start a career in UX, along with Don’t Make Me Think, How to Make Sense of Any Mess and Universal Principles of Design.