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If Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas had written a book for UX Designers, this book would have been A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making. This is certainly the The Pragmatic Programmer for designers.
The book brings the entire environment and life cycle of a web application project to discussion, showing how each piece connects with others and where the UX Designer role fits into it. It also details how particular activities and tasks look like and what are the best practices for them.
But it doesn’t stop there, it goes way beyond, really deep into what a UX Designer really needs to know and do to become a proficient and useful asset for products and projects and a valuable player for development teams.
Why Pragmatic?
The book details really strong points the designer has to have in mind and account for before, during, and after “designing”:

• User research: methods are analyzed in practical terms of planning and execution like: challenges, time frame for estimation, budgeting, motivation…
• Scope, requirements and prioritization: recognizing and engaging stakeholders, balancing user needs and business needs, presenting and defending requirements, working with legacy requirements…
• Project Methodologies: differences between Agile and Waterfall and how to use the benefits and behave in both, how the rhythim and outcome of the team change from one to the other…
• SEO: one of the largest chapters in the book is devoted for SEO, with a really good and rich overview of what SEO is and what are the common mistakes and things to look for when designing and defining navigation and interactions.

In order to enable Information Architects and Interaction Designers to work and provide good solutions for web based applications and content, you can’t just show them how to use a wireframing tool and define Personas. The real work consists in knowing what the web and the project offers to you and what are its constraints, and the books does a real good job in capturing it.
Designer Who?
The UX Designer role is relatively new for most companies and even for Web Designers in general. The book does a good job on defining what a UX Designer is and what are the ideal attributions it has and what are other responsibilities it might have in different companies.
Mixing this with the really good overview in projects and companies environment, a summary of other common (and not-so-common) roles involved in web applications projects is also presented and the relationship between them and the designer is commented, as well as how the UX Design can benefit from them.
For Freelancers and Enterprise’ds
It’s interesting the amount of attention dedicated to the company and the project culture, it’s not just about what the UX Designer will do and how, but where and with who. After all, working for small business with direct contact to the CEO or Marketing VP is certainly not the same thing as working for department managers or really small companies that might not even have a Marketing department.
The way stakeholders and the requirements gathering process is presented reminded me of some Yourdon’s Death March excerpts, but the idea is: sometimes you’ll have several people (stakeholders) to please, plus the user. How to make the tough call, or how to provide best solutions that fits them all? – If it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck, make it a duck… but how? The book helps on this.
Freelancers have an special attention with an entire chapter about writing the proposal and services agreement document, with examples and concepts. Even legal details are mentioned. This chapter is also good for non-Freelancer Designers as it shows how to present design proposals and specs in professional looking and useful documents.
Conclusion
A Project Guide to UX Design is a must buy for web designers in general, and a really good add to the bookshelve of web developers – remember, standing in the other’s shoes is gold – and people involved with IA teams and web products strategy.
It was a really good read for me ramping up in the Product Management and Agile Product Owner thing. RECOMMENDED.