Book Review - This is Service Design Thinking

Service Design has been an interesting topic for me for a some time. Finally I wanted to get more understanding about it and its basic. That's the reason I got my hands on a book that was saying to be "the book" for service design -This is Service Design Thinking by Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider.

I was super excited to start reading about the wonderful world of service design. I read and read and read and became really bored. First hundred pages of the book the authors are trying to say WE ARE IMPORTANT. I knew it already, designing good services is important and doing it structured way with service design must be even more important. After this start, I wasn't anymore really sure. If someone needs to state in so many different ways that they are important, maybe they really are not.

In the middle section book got better. It told in short articles, bit like blog posts, methods to do service design. Unfortunately these were quite simplistic and didn't dig into most of those properly. If you think of a book like Gamestorming, that's about ten times more useful for these methods than this book.

My hopes was for the last section of the book, examples of service design. As the whole book, that turned out to be a disappointment too. Examples were not really interesting and the way those were presented was quite dull. In one of the examples the designed service never got in to use, but they stated project was still a success. I think the exact opposite. Service which was designed but never got live, is a failure, real big failure.

Book was planned by top service designers and that might have been that the reading experience also failed. They tried in top of everything to renew the concept of a book with coloring, icons and lines going here and there. That made the book complex to read. Maybe there would not have been need to renew a such a working concept that a book is.

I honestly don't recommend this book to anyone. I want to believe Service Design and the people behind service design. This book does no good to the practice. There must be better books about the subject than this one.

I don't think I learned anything about this book. At least not in the positive way. Do yourself a favor, mark this to the "no go" list.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review - The Non-Designer's Design Book

This book had been a long time in my reading list. I've wanted to read The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin P. Williams for few years already. I've read some design books before and customer experiences are also my favorite work subject. Design is such a big part of experiences, that I've wanted to learn much more about that subject for some time.

I had read so many good reviews about the book, that expectations towards the book was high. When I received the book and started scim the book through I was bit amazed. I had imagined it to be somewhat different. I was bit disappointed at first.

When I finally started to read the book, I totally loved it. It went back to the very basics of design. It goes through the basic concepts of Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity. Understanding and following these basic elements would make many documents and presentations so much better. The best thing is, that book explains all of these with ease and fun.

The later section of the book concentrates on text and fonts. Understanding fonts was really a new thing to me. I do see text differently after reading this book. I've known that there are many different fonts out there, but I haven't really realized how those work together and what is the difference of all those. Now I've scratched the surface on typefaces and I definitely want to learn more.

This book should be mandatory in all the schools, where presentations and documents need to be created. We would have so much more informative and pleasant reading experiences if everyone would have read at least the first part of the book. The fonts section was fun for me, but I can imagine it won't be for everyone.

It was fun, easy and important book to read. I highly recommend this to everyone.
 
Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book review: Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds

Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds was a book I was expecting to read for a long time. I've heard so much positive about it and I knew it to be visual and enjoyable. It turned out to be everything and bit more I expected.

Presentation Zen is mainly about presentations done with Power Point or some other similar tool. Luckily, it's not only about those, that would be bit boring. It actually shares so much wisdom on the area of presentation and design, that everyone should read it. It tells also some basics about Zen and Japanese culture, what makes the book even more special.

Overall it's enjoyable to read with lot's of good visual pages and examples. It really walks the talk with well designed pages to prove the meaning of a good design. Of course form of a book doesn't give full right to all presentations, due the lack of presenter being there, but it's as perfect as a book can be in this subject. It's not only telling about writers thoughts on the area, but interestingly connects idea from many other brilliant thinkers.

I often don't like guide books. I don't believe in instructions that say that you should do this and that to succeed. I think that most of the cases, how you should do something is related to the moment. One size just don't fit all. Even though this book emphasizes the usage of pictures quite much and instructs to cut down the words in slides, overall it doesn't give that strict instruction to make better presentations. It gives guidelines which can be used for creating suitable presentations for unique moments. That's the way I like it.

As you might guess already, I definitely recommend this book.. It's easy to read, fast and enjoyable. And best of all, it's full of good insights how to be a better presenter and better in communication overall. To be honest, I don't know to whom, I wouldn't recommend this book. It's a piece that everyone should read.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book review - Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda

Laws of Simplicity is one of the books I had heard a lot of beforehand. It had become a sort of a trend book in our office for making many things simpler and clearer. It was referred in so many different occasions, that I wasn't really sure what to expect. Book is from John Maeda, who is designer, artist and educator. Still the book isn't only about design, but much more.

Mr. Maeda takes the ambitious mission of explaining simplicity in the book. I've always thought that simplicity is something some people just seem to understand, and others just don't. It's kind of like an eye for something. John Maeda has taken this task to gather many different ways (or laws as he calls) simplicity appears. It's a challenging task, but he has done it really well.

Mr. Maeda introduces in simple way the usual forms of simplicity and gives small introduction how people can try to learn to understand these forms of simplicity. In the book he explains these laws and gives some ways for all of us to learn to build simpler things. It doesn't really matter what you are building, these laws are trying to be universal to suit from SW business to house building.

This might be the first book, that I've thought to be too short. I think Mr. Maeda has relied too much on his first law of Reduce and shortened the book too much. I would have really liked to get some more insights of some of the laws presented in the book. Few more good examples would have made a difference on understanding some key aspects of this book. Even though I think most of the books are bit too long, maybe in this case few more chapter would have a made difference. It's a matter of taste, like simplicity.

This book is not only for designers. This is a good book for almost everyone. Everywhere in the world there are things, products or services which are too complex. In addition the book is fast and fun to read, so it won't take lot of time to read it trough. Still somehow I feel, I might go and read the book again someday. It's good to remind remind yourself on the basics of simplicity once in a while.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen