I bought Just Enough Research by Erika Hall in at least 2016 and I finally made time to read this great A Book Apart book. Great, quick read (that should not take you 8 years to read) that covers a wide breadth of user research topics with “just enough” depth to make it an informative but easy read.
Thoughts on How to Speak Machine
Picked up John Maeda’s How to Speak Machine: Computational Thinking for the Rest of Us and read through it pretty quickly, but I’m not sure it was a worthwhile read for me and I don’t think I’d recommend it for anyone already familiar with modern software design.
Maeda spends the majority of the book’s 200 pages explaining the basics and extolling the value of UX research, product design, agile delivery, and iterative development and comparatively little on the actual premise of the book.
Both Amazon and Maeda frame the book as a way for designers to understand “the complex world of AI and machine learning”, but while it hints at AI’s transformative potential these mentions are more speculative than practical. There really isn’t any actionable insights or detailed explorations of how AI can concretely impact design work today.