Why companies need to move away from a “product first” orientation to pursuing innovation based on customer need.In the past, companies found success with a product-first orientation; they made a thing that did a thing. The Inversion Factor explains why the companies of today and tomorrow will have to abandon the product-first orientation. Rather than asking “How do the products we make meet customer needs?” companies should ask “How can technolog...

A roadmap for how we can rebuild America's working class by transforming workforce education and training.The American dream promised that if you worked hard, you could move up, with well-paying working-class jobs providing a gateway to an ever-growing middle class. Today, however, we have increasing inequality, not economic convergence. Technological advances are putting quality jobs out of reach for workers who lack the proper skills and training. In Workforc...

Building products and services that people interact with is the big challenge of the 21st century. Dan Saffer has done an amazing job synthesizing the chaos into an understandable, ordered reference that is a bookshelf must-have for anyone thinking of creating new designs.”— Jared Spool, CEO of User Interface EngineeringInteraction design is all around us. If you’ve ever wondered why your mobile phone looks pretty but doesn’t work well, you’ve confronted bad interaction desi...

Make the Most of QFD and the Voice of the Customer in Six Sigma EnvironmentsQuality Function Deployment (QFD) techniques have helped thousands of organizations deliver higher-quality, more user-focused product designs. Now, Lou Cohen’s classic guide to QFD has been thoroughly updated to fully align QFD with Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) and other state-of-the-art Six Sigma methodologies.Revised by world-class Six Sigma expert Joe Ficalora and his team at Sigm...

This highly focused book approaches quality specifically in the context of project management. It goes beyond the usual descriptions and advice for manufactured products to give project managers a framework of deliberate steps to take in managing quality for the benefit of project outcomes in any domain. This user-friendly guide presents tools and techniques that implement the general methods defined in the Project Management Body of Knowledge, and augments those methods with more detailed...

Explore the new design discipline that is behind such products as the iPod and innovative Web sites like Flickr. While other books on this subject are either aimed at more seasoned practitioners or else are too focused on a particular medium like software, this guide will take a more holistic approach to the discipline, looking at interaction design for the Web, software, and devices. It is the only interaction design book that is coming from a designers point of view rather than that of a...

An effective and engaging way employees can learn Six Sigma and put its concepts into playPart of the popular Big Book of Games series, which capitalizes on the proven effective method for workplace training, this first book of training games for Six Sigma ensures that employees will better retain Six Sigma's complex topics.This invaluable tool offers 50 experiential activities that teach the core improvement approach of Six Sigma, called DMAIC (Define, Mea...

How can you design technology that becomes a part of a user’s life and not a distraction from it? This practical book explores the concept of calm technology, a method for smoothly capturing a user’s attention only when necessary, while calmly remaining in the background most of the time. You’ll learn how to design products that work well, launch well, are easy to support, easy to use, and remain unobtrusive.Author Amber Case presents ideas first introduced by researchers at Xerox ...

Feeling uninspired? That shouldn’t keep you from creating great design work. Design is not about luck, inspiration, or personal expression. Design is a disciplined pursuit aimed at producing sensible, functional work for clients. In The Design Method, you’ll learn how to create quality design work on a regular basis that consistently pleases your clients using the same method that Creative Director Eric Karjaluoto uses at his creative agency, smashLAB. The Design Method w...

Social Media Marketing: preparation, consumption, and hangover prevention is a textbook focused on strategically examining social media advertising in 2023. Content focuses on the history of social media and marketing, consumer behaviour/social media's effect on society, and the role of influencers in social media marketing.This is followed by a platform-by-platform examination of best practices in organic and paid advertising for eight of the major social media pl...

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is the newest wave in productivity. This revolutionary approach is an outcome of lean thinking; however, PLM eliminates waste and efficiency across all aspects of a product's life--from design to deployment--not just in its manufacture. By using people, product information, processes, and technology to reduce wasted time, energy, and material across an organization and into the supply chain, PLM drives the next generation of lean thinking.

This updated and expanded edition discusses many different tools for root cause analysis and presents them in an easy-to-follow structure: a general description of the tool, its purpose and typical applications, the procedure when using it, an example of its use, a checklist to help you make sure if is applied properly, and different forms and templates. The examples used are general enough to apply to any industry or market. The layout of the book has been designed to help speed your lear...