Sara Wachter-Boettcher

An excellent introduction to compassionate design, full of tactics to add to your toolkit, but the lack of any real discussion around disabled people is uncomfortable. I felt like most examples focused around people having bad days due to injury, death, etc. -- the book should have had more examples from marginalized communities.

Also, the frequently used example of the period tracking app as being for women (when trans people are mentioned here and there in the book) feels like the authors show more could have benefitted from taking their own advice and challenging their own assumptions. show less

The title evokes Papanek's classic "Design for the Real World," but the area of overlap is limited. Papanek looks at how design should extend its practice to the massive portion of our population that's underserved, and the consequences of design choices & outcomes on a global and societal scale. Here, Meyer & Wachter-Boettcher look at how to treat those we currently service with compassion, and the consequences of design choices & outcomes on an individual and human scale.

Design for Real show more Life has stories, cases studies, tactics, and practical techniques for humanizing design and understanding how, when we design at scale, to better serve the entirety of our audience. Many designers and researchers will be familiar with some of the practices here—personas, journey mapping, interviewing, and so on. The Real Life frame (think "stress case" over "edge case") offers insight into how we can humanize our existing design practices and find new ways to bring compassion and human understanding into the process. show less

I liked this a lot. Wachter-Boettcher walks you through some basic steps about analyzing the mass of your content and trying to find that "just right" level of detail (although in many cases we have to do this before we know what all we are going to need in terms of content). She encourages building bridges between the technical team and the CME's. And then she also argues for building some structure into our content with the hope that we can then use it in API's. (All the more reason to use show more LibraryThing!)

The weakness here is that it can be difficult to apply... in my situation, we have a ton of content, very disparate (university), and some amount of system lock-in (resource constrained, like all organizations). But contemplation is the first step, and this little book will be one more nudge in that direction.

My list of links and notes and related items is at http://chellerystick.com/lists/content-everywhere-home-companion show less

3.5 stars. I am 100% behind the issues laid out in the book...but my issues are with the construction and function of the book itself.

Who is the target audience? Tech/design industry folks or outsiders? The jargon and references were inconsistent enough times that it never sat well with me.

This felt at times like a lot of anecdotes strung loosely together, and I had to glance at the chapter title or flip back a few pages to remember what the theme was.

What is the major takeaway? The tech show more industry has flaws? Here is a list of socioculturally oriented flaws? Here are ways to address those flaws? And again, it depends on whether this book is intended for tech professionals, laypeople, etc.

This was an ambitious effort and an eye-opening read even for those of us familiar with these issues, but the execution needed polish to keep it cohesive. show less