Note to self: beware of "Pocket" books. This is a great compendium of methods of design but it really suffers from its reduced size. I just checked and there is actually standard A4 sized publication with the same material but the pictures/photos/diagrams are double the size ...so you can actually read the details without having to try and magnify them ...and still have difficulty. Now that I think about it, I have been caught like this before where a cheap or pocket version of a successful book is produced but the diagrams etc., are also reduced to the point where the print is microscopic...or just blurry and hard to decipher. So much for the format...but you get the idea.
The content is actually very good in my humble opinion. Lots of really good suggestions about how to brainstorm or develop good design....some of it seemed a bit repetitive....like having a meeting and putting lots of 'Post-it" notes on a board and then cauterising them. Actually, I've participated in meetings like this that were designed to prioritise certain actions.......but as I thought about the process, we had many people there with limited experience/knowledge about the issues ...and the consequences of actions. But all participant's views were given equal weight. In my view there might have been one critical action that outweighed all the others, but, by the lowest common denominator approach, that fell off the list entirely because only one person or a few were able to understand its significance. Conversely, one might argue that the group opinion is always going to be superior to the individual opinion because it takes into account so many perspectives. Anyway, this is just one technique among 125 or so.
I'm not going to try and catalogue the 125 different techniques here but a few of them are; mind mapping, stakeholder maps, simulations, questionnaires, literature review, participant observation, Kano analysis (what's important to the customer), eye tracking (what holds the eye), design workshops, crowd sourcing and web analytics.
If I was facing a design problem ...or even some decision about corporate action.....I would like to take a flick through this little book to get some tips on possible ways to explore potential actions. There is certainly a wealth of possibilities there and most of them seem pretty sensible. Happy to give this book four stars. I'd probably give the larger version of the book five stars. ( )