“Making is cheap. Being wrong is still expensive.”
From Anyone can build anything now in UX Is Dead, Long Live UX by Craig Weston.
The featured book / Design for the real world
UX is dead.
Long live UX.
An afternoon’s read for designers, product managers and engineers who’d rather solve the right problem than build the wrong one at astonishing speed. There are practical steps, Japanese design ideas and a few well-earned grumbles about confusing interfaces.
Inside the thinking
Good UX goes
beyond the UI.
The tools have changed. Humans still scan, guess, get distracted and try the door marked PULL by pushing it. These are the fundamentals I keep coming back to.
01 / FOUNDATIONS
Understand the problem.
Speak to real people. Learn what they are actually trying to do. Resist designing for a perfectly patient imaginary person who reads every instruction.
02 / CRAFT
Make complex feel simple.
Make the next action obvious, show what happened and give people a way back when things go pear-shaped.
03 / THE FUTURE
Build beyond the trend.
New tools arrive every Tuesday. Human attention, patience and common sense are still in fairly limited supply.
BOOK NOTES / HUMAN-CENTRED DESIGN
Some ideas worth
underlining.
Three thoughts from the book that deserve a little room to themselves.
“When adding is free, taking away is the skill.”
From Six Japanese words every designer should know in UX Is Dead, Long Live UX by Craig Weston.
“Research doesn’t slow you down. Building the wrong thing does.”
From Become the person who knows the users best in UX Is Dead, Long Live UX by Craig Weston.
Published book extracts
A small taste of the book. The rest is considerably more useful than the back of a cereal packet, I hope.
Buy the book
A little thinking
for your bookshelf.
The book is available on Amazon. For book-club questions, bulk orders or a particularly interesting enquiry, you can also get in touch.
Option 01
Buy on Amazon
Visit the official Amazon product listing to select an available edition and complete your order securely.
Shop on Amazon ↗Option 02 / Enquiries
Buy direct from Craig
Want to discuss a bulk order, signed copy or event? Drop me a note and we can work out the details without involving a shopping basket that doesn’t exist.
Enquire about an order ↗READ A LITTLE · FROM THE ACTUAL BOOK
Ideas worth
carrying with you.
A few properly sourced lines from the first edition, with their chapter context. No inspirational fridge magnets were harmed.
01 / CHAPTER 1Build the right thing.
“When building is this cheap, the expensive mistake isn’t building something badly; it’s building the wrong thing.”
From Anyone can build anything now. This is why discovery matters even when prototyping is effortless.
02 / CHAPTER 3簡素 · Kanso.
“Kanso means eliminating clutter and leaving out whatever isn’t essential. It isn’t minimalism for the sake of looking minimal; it’s about clarity.”
From Six Japanese words every designer should know · An approach that runs through my own work.
03 / STEP 3Know your users.
“AI can help you understand your research. It can’t do your research.”
From Become the person who knows the users best · Why observation and real conversations remain essential.
See the thinking in practice