For the UX Book Club Switzerland, we decided to shoot for the moon by starting the year with “Designing for the digital age: How to create human-centered products and services” by Kim Goodwin. It’s one hell of a book: It has about 700 pages, weights almost 2 kilos and the dimensions are 23 x 19 x 4 (!) cm.

We decided to do 3 meetings to talk about the book. Now the second meeting is over and we decided to go on to another book, because most of the participants did not really manage to finish the book. Therefore I would like to share a short roundup of the book. The points of this review are partly those of the participants of the book club and partly mine.

Positive points:

• the whole goal directed design process is very transparently explained from user research until detailed design.
  
• very good examples of real-world situations (e.g. how to talk to the stakeholders, how to do user interviews). You can learn a lot from the professional experience of the author.
• great exercises throughout the book, where you can directly practice the things you have learned

 Negative points:

• The goal directed design process seems to be only suitable for very large projects. It would be great to have an example of a project that shows how the steps can be scaled down to use it for smaller projects. 
• It’s hard to read the whole book just because of its physical properties: it’s heavy and cumbersome to read on your lap (e.g. in the train) and there is no electronic issue available
  
• the website of the book with additional material (e.g. for exercises) is not online anymore (the book was published in 2008):  http://www.designingforthedigitalage.com/ 

Conclusion

A great book if you want to know how to make your design process user-centered. It’s also a good reference-book, for example if you are planning user research and want to get some advice how to prepare for it. The book describes all situations that you can imagine during the design process, so it’s also a good book for beginners, who would like to get an overview. You just need a lot of stamina to read it through.