Effective UX work is necessarily complex and challenging—and necessarily collaborative. Drawing on their extensive collective experience, the contributors to this edited collection offer valuable insights and practical guidance for UX professionals seeking to navigate the complexities of collaborative work and create effective, user-centered products and services. Collaborations and Partnerships in User Experience focuses on the importance of building and nurturing relationships, fostering open communication, and ensuring that all partners benefit from collaborative efforts. The chapters in the collection offer theoretical frameworks, case studies, and lessons learned from successful (and sometimes unsuccessful) collaborative projects. They also explore the challenges that can arise in UX collaborations, such as differing priorities, vocabularies, and institutional structures, as well as the strategies employed to overcome these hurdles and achieve meaningful outcomes.

A respected voice on technology shows how seemingly simple ads help dismantle democracy and public discourse.

Whether you’re intentionally shopping or casually browsing social media, something is following you: ads. Their creators seem to know your income bracket, politics, age, location, medical conditions, and tastes in clothing, food, and romantic partners. As advertising firms use predictive AI to discover your hot buttons and generative AI to push them, your online world becomes an increasingly bespoke—and isolated—place. The fervid competition around personalization in digital marketing has given rise to an ecosystem of advertisers, media outlets, tech companies, and retailers who monetize your data while threatening the health of our media, discourse, and sense of community. In this urgent book, award-winning author Joseph Turow shows how we got here, and how to change direction.

The Problem with Personalization shatters common beliefs about advertising history by showing that individualized ads are not new. Today’s AI-enabled advertisers draw on past aspirations and assumptions about personalization while weaponizing data in unprecedented ways that drive social fragmentation and the disappearance of shared social reality. Informed by interviews with marketing insiders and covering the latest technology advances, Turow accessibly explains how artificial intelligence sifts through our data to tag and target us wherever we go with personalized videos, pictorial billboards, audio messages, and more. A logical next step for advertiser support is tailored entertainment and news, a shift that further destroys the common ground necessary for a functioning democracy.

A must-read for all who care about the future of public discourse, The Problem with Personalization reveals how targeted advertising has altered how we’re seen and what we see in return.