It’s hard to believe that it’s been 15 years since Russ and I began writing the first edition of A Project Guide to UX Design!

Back then, my motivation was to help the people that I was hiring right out of undergraduate and Masters programs related to Human Computer Interaction. Often they knew many of the activities involved in User Experience Design, but struggled in adapting to their use in a real work environment.

Helping stakeholders align on a direction, visualizing and iterating on multiple approaches over time, prioritizing possibilities, and working with constraints are all skills that designers need in order to help their great ideas come to light. And often, they’re truly learned in the field. A book can help though, if it brings those facets of the work to the front; and that’s what we aimed to do.

Five years later we came out with the second edition, and of course (in the ways of the Tech industry) a lot had changed. Responsive and mobile design were becoming essential for designers to understand, and content management systems much more robust.

Now, over ten years since our last edition, it’s interesting to revisit all of this as we work on the third. Rather than pining for a better tool, UX designers and researchers are putting effort into deciding which of the many ones out there will best fit our needs. (Well, ok, there’s still some pining… but there are so many options to compare that many people can find a toolset that they like, or even love.)

Russ and I are working on distilling the most important updates for a major reworking the book, to be released early in 2024. More to come!