Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die | By Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Drawing extensively on psychosocial studies on memory, emotion and motivation, their study is couched in terms of “stickiness”—that is, the art of making ideas unforgettable. They start by relating the gruesome urban legend about a man who succumbs to a barroom flirtation only to wake up in a tub of ice, victim of an organ-harvesting ring. What makes such stories memorable and ensures their spread around the globe? The authors credit six key principles: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories.

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future | By Daniel H. Pink
With visionary flare, Pink argues that business and everyday life will soon be dominated by right-brain thinkers. He identifies the roots and implications of transitioning from a society dominated by left-brain thinkers into something entirely different—although at times, he seems to be exhorting rather than observing the trend. As a narrator, Pink delivers in a well executed manner, with occasional hints of enthusiasm.

Technique for Producing Ideas | By James Young
Since its publication in 1965, A Technique for Producing Ideas has helped thousands of advertising copywriters smash through internal barriers to unleash their creativity. Professionals from poets and painters to scientists and engineers have also used the techniques in this concise, powerful book to generate exciting ideas on demand, at any time, on any subject. Now let James Webb Young’s unique insights help you look inside yourself to find that big, elusive idea–and once and for all lift the veil of mystery from the creative process.

How to Get Ideas | By Jack Foster
How To Get Ideas answers the basic questions of where do ideas come from, why do some people get so many of them, and is there some secret technique to getting more of them. How To Get Ideas answers these questions and demonstrates that any reader, regardless of age or skill, employment or training, can come up with more ideas, faster and easier than ever before in his or her life. Author Jack Foster shows how to condition the mind and become “idea-prone”; how to make the child within us and our sense of humor work for us; how to develop our curiosity, visualize our goals, rethinking our thinking, combine different ideas, and overcome our fear of rejection

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea | By Sam Harrison
How do you unleash bursts of creativity, increase occurrences of spontaneity and ultimately find great ideas? Through anecdotes, interviews, quotes, tips, creative exercises and success stories from the biggest corporations in the country, author Sam Harrison shows you how to think outside the box—then throw away the box for good.

 
Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques | By Michael Michalko
Tinkertoys  will teach you how to generate new ideas for businesses, markets, sales techniques, and products and product extensions. Packed with fun and practical tools and exercises, it outlines 30 practical linear and intuitive techniques that can be used by individuals or groups to tackle and solve business problems in fresh, creative ways. An updated edition of the best-selling business creativity book, with more than 30 brainstorming techniques and hundreds of creative-thinking tips and tricks. Revision includes new techniques, examples, and sections on group brainstorming and endgames.

A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative  | By Roger von Oech
Now Roger von Oech’s fully illustrated and updated volume is filled with even more provocative puzzles, anecdotes, exercises, metaphors, cartoons, questions, quotations, stories, and tips designed to systematically break through your mental blocks and unlock your mind for creative thinking. This new edition will attract an entire new generation of readers with updated and mind-stretching material.

 
Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius | By Michael Michalko
What exactly is creativity? Why do some people seem to have so much of it? Can their secrets be learned? In this trail-blazing book, internationally renowned business creativity expert Michael Michalko answers these questions and more, bringing life-changing techniques into everyone’s reach. Michalko has researched and analyzed over 100 of history’s greatest thinkers-from Leonardo da Vinci to Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison to Walt Disney-to show readers how creative people think and how to put their secrets to use.

Caffeine for the Creative Mind | By Stefan Mumaw
For any designer or creative type who wants to quickly limber up their imagination on a daily basis, Wired helps readers get into the creative zone, from which all their best work springs. Packed with 15-minute simple and conceptual exercises, this guide will have readers reaching for markers, pencils, digital cameras, and more in order to develop a working and productive creative mindset.

Zing!: Five Steps and 101 Tips for Creativity On Command | By Sam Harrison
A five-step process for generating big ideas in business, personal, and professional contexts is outlined in this high-energy guide to the creative process. Real-world anecdotes and inspirational messages complement the straightforward discussions of exploring, being free, pausing, embracing, and enjoying life. These five steps cover issues such as how to use observation to uncover fresh ideas, how potential ideas are stymied, and how incubation allows the subconscious to find solutions.

Related posts:

1. 20 User Experience Books you should own

So, as designers for the web, how can we make forms less evil and more usable? Why by following these 10 commandments of course!

1. Use labels above your fields for reduced completion time.
2. Try to avoid using optional fields. These only make the form longer, and can’t be that important if they’re optional.
3. Group related content together for more organized forms.
4. Remove secondary actions and focus on primary ones. That is, most people don’t use “reset”, “cancel” or “back” but rather use “submit”, “continue” and “register”.
5. For long forms, break them out into steps with a progress indicator.
6. For short forms, consider using a modal window to allow users to sign-in or register without leaving their spot in on site.
7. Provide flexible data input. Don’t you hate it when you have to enter your phone number in a particular format? Allow users to enter as they prefer.
8. Clearly communicate when an error has occured at the top of the form in a visual language that can be repeated next to the field in question.
9. When a user submits a form, provide a visual clue that the “wheels are turning” and consider deactivating the “submit” button.
10. Once the form submission is successful, let the user know. This way they can stop sweating and know they have survived their confrontation with evil.

Related posts:

1. The 65 Most Annoying things about the Web Today

What are your top 5 User Experience books?

1. Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World
   by Peter Merholz
2. Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning
   by Dan Brown
3. Contextual Design: A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs (Interactive Technologies)
   by Hugh Beyer
4. Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience
   by James Kalbach and Aaron Gustafson
5. Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices (Voices That Matter)
   by Dan Saffer
6. Designing for the Social Web (Voices That Matter)
   by Joshua Porter
7. Designing Interfaces
   by Jenifer Tidwell
8. Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design
   by Robert Hoekman Jr.
9. Designing Web Interfaces
   By Bill Scott
10. The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web (Voices That Matter)
    by Jesse James Garrett
11. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
    by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville
    
12. A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making
    by Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler
13. Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition
    by Steve Krug
14. Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics (Interactive Technologies)
    by Thomas Tullis
15. Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design
    by Bill Buxton
16. Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior
    by Indi Young
    
17. Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions
    by Tim Ash
    
18. Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks
    by Luke Wroblewski
19. The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
    by Dan Roam
    
20. Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research
    By Mike Kuniavsky

Related posts:

1. 10 Books to becoming an Idea Generating Machine
2. Wearable Technology, the next User Experience Frontier
3. Caution: 5 Common Usability Testing Mistakes to Avoid

Seoptimise.com has compiled a more diverse set of trends covering web design, search and SEO, social media and blogging, marketing and software. Read the article.

Related posts:

1. Mobile Web Design trends for 2009

Buxton is a champion for design, not only as a discipline, but also as a process.  In fact, he places huge emphasis on the design process, as he believes it plays a huge role in the success of the product’s adoption in the market place.

As he constantly reinforces how critical design is to the success of any product’s conception and evolution, it was a single page that drove the point home to me. A simple list of roles and positions within a typical company:

Leadership = CEO
Stewardship = COO
Resource Management = CFO
Technology = CTO
Design = ?

The point he’s making here is one of how companies often do not consider design as a critical discipline required for innovation, and furthermore do not have the level of leadership needed to elevate this realization.

As part of the process discussion, Buxton believes that sketches can be employed to suggest, explore, question, propose and provoke in a rapid fashion. Whereas prototypes then serve to describe, refine, answer, test, and resolve.  As Buxton mentions in the book, fail fast and early, learn fast and early.  

I highly recommend this book, it’s not often that the topic of creating user experience is covered in such a holistic and practical manner.  Get the Book!

Related posts:

1. Mobile Web Design trends for 2009