Collaborative Product Design: Help Any Team Build a Better Experience

This book is so well written and practical.

There is a sad website with 3 templates associated with this book. Even though links are referenced throughout the book. Was looking for some new resources to use in teaching. O'Reilly should hire a high school student so they can improve the site and add the content advertised.

Hopefully the book will be useful, unfortunately it starts on page 17.

I'm glad Austin wrote this book! (Though I agree with his opening statement that this might not be the last book you'd really need.)I'm looking forward to implementing some revisions to my practice and reorienting some of my collaboration behaviors using some of the tools Austin outlines, complete with cute drawings. The Harry Potter Glasses graph would be, with a bit of modification to match what context you face, useful for design challenges and reviews.However, that note about matching context gets to why I might not hand this book straight away to new designers, or people in or just out of design bootcamps. What Austin outlines in his book are frameworks, and as such should never be applied blindly and religiously, step by step, but should be adapted to meet what you, in your professional practice, have discovered about the problems, the situation, and the context at hand. I say this with kindness, but inexperienced or junior designers are often trained to or take to following directions step by step -- and I can see where without interrogating the context or the experience that comes from that, designers getting in trouble if they try to take Austin's guidance and turn it into rigid step-by-step instructions.So, we can all learn, and we can all share what we've learned. As I said, I look forward to giving some of what I've learned from this book a shot.

Austin understands that effective collaboration starts with a shared understanding of what you are trying to accomplish. The toolkit he provides takes the best from project management, design thinking, business analysis, facilitation, and team management and puts them into a coherent, easy-to-apply package.Though he wrote this book for fellow digital solutions designers, I find that I can apply much of his advice to other contexts - such as service design, process design, systems improvement, and analog product development.His writing is approachable, witty, and no-nonsense. He's been in the trenches for years and it shows.I'm glad that Austin took the time to distill his experience into this book. My copy is already starting to get dog-eared as I start a new online course design project.Full disclosure: I had a chance to meet Austin many years ago at a retreat in Texas. He was kind enough to send me a copy of the book for review.

I have nothing but praise for this book. It is well designed; Austin Govella organized its complex content in approachable ways.In terms of organization, the author divided the book into five parts and clearly provided options for how to read it based on the reader's own time and learning preferences. If you're in a jam and need to get the 30,000 foot overview of it all, you can get the gist in just 60 pages. With a little more time and interest, you can do it in 110 pages, or you can go all out for the full 380 pages.The author also used a variety of means to help readers understand the special challenges involved in collaborative design. He did it without appealing to hip words many use but don't understand like 'empathy' and 'agile' that may require additional reading to understand. One example of his approachable style sticks out in particular: The Story of the Miller, his Son, and the Donkey. In it, Govella used a children's story to illustrate how to balance the ideas of others in and out of your company as you pursue solutions to your user's goals. The main lesson is focus on the user's goals when interpreting the suggestions and criticisms of others. That's just one example.While you could jump right into this book as a complete novice, there's a lot here, maybe more than a newbie could easily tackle..., but that's what makes the organization of the book so wonderful. This book will bring you through a lot of solid frameworks, so if you're looking for maps, canvases, etc for all of your Users, Interfaces, Interactions, and Goals, you're looking at the right book.Again, I really like this book, and it's a great reference book to have on my shelf. I had the good fortune to receive a copy of this book for review from the author, as we are both members of a designer retreat group. And as a reference, I would easily buy it for myself or a friend in product design or related areas.

Anyone working in content, interaction design, product design or strategy will find this book endlessly useful.Easy to read, reference, and go to a depth of information (thanks to the inclusion of Web resources / templates), Govella takes on the solution space for complex problems deftly. Seeing design as an organizational, not merely personal, outcome of good design practice is something discussed broadly and abstractly in many corners. But the author takes on that broad, lofty space and gives it practical, pragmatic structure that can only come from a veteran of having designed these solutions.Every page is thoughtfully written and practical in a way that on the first read you know you're not absorbing as much as you'd like -- but then assure yourself that since this is a book, you can always reference it later. Practical and widely applicable, you'll be able to positively affect your org's ability to create better products within minutes.

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