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The UX Book
Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience
- 1st Edition - January 25, 2012
- Authors: Rex Hartson, Pardha S. Pyla
- Language: English
- Hardback ISBN:9 7 8 - 0 - 1 2 - 3 8 5 2 4 1 - 0
- eBook ISBN:9 7 8 - 0 - 1 2 - 3 8 5 2 4 2 - 7
The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience aims to help readers learn how to create and refine interaction designs that ensure a quality user… Read more
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Request a sales quoteThe UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience aims to help readers learn how to create and refine interaction designs that ensure a quality user experience (UX). The book seeks to expand the concept of traditional usability to a broader notion of user experience; to provide a hands-on, practical guide to best practices and established principles in a UX lifecycle; and to describe a pragmatic process for managing the overall development effort. The book provides an iterative and evaluation-centered UX lifecycle template, called the Wheel, for interaction design. Key concepts discussed include contextual inquiry and analysis; extracting interaction design requirements; constructing design-informing models; design production; UX goals, metrics, and targets; prototyping; UX evaluation; the interaction cycle and the user action framework; and UX design guidelines. This book will be useful to anyone interested in learning more about creating interaction designs to ensure a quality user experience. These include interaction designers, graphic designers, usability analysts, software engineers, programmers, systems analysts, software quality-assurance specialists, human factors engineers, cognitive psychologists, cosmic psychics, trainers, technical writers, documentation specialists, marketing personnel, and project managers.
- A very broad approach to user experience through its components—usability, usefulness, and emotional impact with special attention to lightweight methods such as rapid UX evaluation techniques and an agile UX development process
- Universal applicability of processes, principles, and guidelines—not just for GUIs and the Web, but for all kinds of interaction and devices: embodied interaction, mobile devices, ATMs, refrigerators, and elevator controls, and even highway signage
- Extensive design guidelines applied in the context of the various kinds of affordances necessary to support all aspects of interaction
- Real-world stories and contributions from accomplished UX practitioners
- A practical guide to best practices and established principles in UX
- A lifecycle template that can be instantiated and tailored to a given project, for a given type of system development, on a given budget
Endorsement
Dedication
Preface
Goals for this book
Usability is still important
But user experience is more than usability
A practical approach
Order of the material
Our audience
Increasing maturity of the discipline and audience
What we do not cover
About the exercises
Projects
Origins of the book
Arousing the design “stickler” in you
Further information on our website
About the authors
Acknowledgments
Guiding Principles for the UX Practitioner
Chapter 1. Introduction
Objectives
1.1 Ubiquitous interaction
1.2 Emerging desire for usability
1.3 From usability to user experience
1.4 Emotional impact as part of the user experience
1.5 User experience needs a business case
1.6 Roots of usability
Chapter 2. The Wheel: A Lifecycle Template
Objectives
2.1 Introduction
2.2 A UX process lifecycle template
2.3 Choosing a process instance for your project
2.4 The system complexity space
2.5 Meet the user interface team
2.6 Scope of UX presence within the team
2.7 More about UX lifecycles
The Pre-Design Part of the UX Lifecycle
Chapter 3. Contextual Inquiry: Eliciting Work Activity Data
Objectives
3.1 Introduction
3.2 The system concept statement
3.3 User work activity data gathering
3.4 Look for emotional aspects of work practice
3.5 Abridged contextual inquiry process
3.6 Data-driven vs. model-driven inquiry
3.7 History
Chapter 4. Contextual Analysis: Consolidating and Interpreting Work Activity Data
Objectives
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Organizing concepts: work roles and flow model
4.3 Creating and managing work activity notes
4.4 Constructing your work activity affinity diagram (WAAD)
4.5 Abridged contextual analysis process
4.6 History of affinity diagrams
Chapter 5. Extracting Interaction Design Requirements
Objectives
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Needs and requirements: first span of the bridge
5.3 Formal requirements extraction
5.4 Abridged methods for requirements extraction
Chapter 6. Constructing Design-Informing Models
Objectives
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Design-informing models: second span of the bridge
6.3 Some general “how to” suggestions
6.4 A New example domain: slideshow presentations
6.5 User models
6.6 Usage models
6.7 Work environment models
6.8 Barrier summaries
6.9 Model consolidation
6.10 Protecting your sources
6.11 Abridged methods for design-informing models extraction
6.12 Roots of essential use cases in software use cases
Chapter 7. Design Thinking, Ideation, and Sketching
Objectives
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Design paradigms
7.3 Design thinking
7.4 Design perspectives
7.5 User personas
7.6 Ideation
7.7 Sketching
7.8 More about phenomenology
Chapter 8. Mental Models and Conceptual Design
Objectives
8.1 Introduction
8.2 Mental models
8.3 Conceptual design
8.4 Storyboards
8.5 Design influencing user behavior
8.6 Design for embodied interaction
8.7 Ubiquitous and situated interaction
Chapter 9. Design Production
Objectives
9.1 Introduction
9.2 Macro view of lifecycle iterations for design
9.3 Intermediate design
9.4 Detailed design
9.5 Wireframes
9.6 Maintain a custom style guide
9.7 Interaction design specifications
9.8 More about participatory design
Summary of the Flow of Actitives in Chapters 3 through 9
Chapter 10. UX Goals, Metrics, and Targets
Objectives
10.1 Introduction
10.2 UX goals
10.3 UX target tables
10.4 Work roles, user classes, and ux goals
10.5 UX measures
10.6 Measuring instruments
10.7 UX metrics
10.8 Baseline level
10.9 Target level
10.10 Setting levels
10.11 Observed results
10.12 Practical tips and cautions for creating ux targets
10.13 How UX targets help manage the user experience engineering process
10.14 An abridged approach to UX goals, metrics, and targets
Chapter 11. Prototyping
Objectives
11.1 Introduction
11.2 Depth and breadth of a prototype
11.3 Fidelity of prototypes
11.4 Interactivity of prototypes
11.5 Choosing the right breadth, depth, level of fidelity, and amount of interactivity
11.6 Paper prototypes
11.7 Advantages of and cautions about using prototypes
11.8 Prototypes in transition to the product
11.9 Software tools for prototyping
Chapter 12. UX Evaluation Introduction
Objectives
12.1 Introduction
12.2 Formative vs. summative evaluation
12.3 Types of formative and informal summative evaluation methods
12.4 Types of evaluation data
12.5 Some data collection techniques
12.6 Variations in formative evaluation results
Chapter 13. Rapid Evaluation Methods
Objectives
13.1 Introduction
13.2 Design walkthroughs and reviews
13.3 UX Inspection
13.4 Heuristic evaluation, a UX inspection method
13.5 Our practical approach to UX Inspection
13.6 Do UX Evaluation rite
13.7 Quasi-empirical UX evaluation
13.8 Questionnaires
13.9 Specialized rapid UX evaluation methods
13.10 More about “discount” UX engineering methods
Chapter 14. Rigorous Empirical Evaluation: Preparation
Objectives
14.1 Introduction
14.2 Plan for rigorous empirical UX evaluation
14.3 Team roles for rigorous evaluation
14.4 Prepare an effective range of tasks
14.5 Select and adapt evaluation method and data collection techniques
14.6 Select participants
14.7 Recruit participants
14.8 Prepare for participants
14.9 Do final pilot testing: fix your wobbly wheels
14.10 More about determining the right number of participants
Chapter 15. Rigorous Empirical Evaluation: Running the Session
Objectives
15.1 Introduction
15.2 Preliminaries with participants
15.3 Protocol issues
15.4 Generating and collecting quantitative UX data
15.5 Generating and collecting qualitative UX data
15.6 Generating and collecting emotional impact data
15.7 Generating and collecting phenomenological evaluation data
15.8 Wrapping up an evaluation session
15.9 The humaine project
Chapter 16. Rigorous Empirical Evaluation: Analysis
Objectives
16.1 Introduction
16.2 Informal summative (quantitative) data analysis
16.3 Analysis of subjective questionnaire data
16.4 Formative (qualitative) data analysis
16.5 Cost-importance analysis: prioritizing problems to fix
16.6 Feedback to process
16.7 Lessons from the field
Chapter 17. Evaluation Reporting
Objectives
17.1 Introduction
17.2 Reporting informal summative results
17.3 Reporting qualitative formative results
17.4 Formative reporting content
17.5 Formative reporting audience, needs, goals, and context of use
Chapter 18. Wrapping up UX Evaluation
Objectives
18.1 Goal-directed UX evaluation
18.2 Choose your UX evaluation methods
18.3 Focus on the essentials
18.4 Parting thoughts: be flexible and avoid dogma during UX evaluation
18.5 Connecting back to the lifecycle
Chapter 19. UX Methods for Agile Development
Objectives
19.1 Introduction
19.2 Basics of agile se methods
19.3 Drawbacks of agile se methods from the UX perspective
19.4 What is needed on the UX side
19.5 Problems to anticipate
19.6 A synthesized approach to integrating UX
Chapter 20. Affordances Demystified
Objectives
20.1 What are affordances?
20.2 A little background
20.3 Four kinds of affordances in UX design
20.4 Affordances in interaction design
20.5 False cognitive affordances misinform and mislead
20.6 User-created affordances as a wake-up call to designers
20.7 Emotional affordances
Chapter 21. The Interaction Cycle and the User Action Framework
Objectives
21.1 Introduction
21.2 The interaction cycle
21.3 The user action framework—adding a structured knowledge base to the interaction cycle
21.4 Interaction cycle and user action framework content categories
21.5 Role of affordances within the uaf
21.6 Practical value of uaf
Chapter 22. UX Design Guidelines
Objectives
22.1 Introduction
22.2 Using and interpreting design guidelines
22.3 Human memory limitations
22.4 Selected ux design guidelines and examples
22.5 Planning
22.6 Translation
22.7 Physical actions
22.8 Outcomes
22.9 Assessment
22.10 Overall
22.11 Conclusions
Chapter 23. Connections with Software Engineering
Objectives
23.1 Introduction
23.2 Locus of influence in an organization
23.3 Which scenario is right for you?
23.4 Foundations for success in SE–UX development
23.5 The challenge of connecting SE and UX
23.6 The ripple model to connect SE and UX
23.7 Conclusions
Chapter 24. Making It Work in the Real World
Objectives
24.1 Putting it to work as a new practitioner
24.2 Be a smart ux practitioner
24.3 UX professionalism
24.4 Cost-justifying UX
24.5 UX within your organization
24.6 Parting words
References
Exercises
Introduction to exercises
Chapter 3 exercises
Chapter 4 exercises
Chapter 5 exercises
Chapter 6 exercises
Chapter 7 exercises
Chapter 8 exercises
Chapter 9 exercises
Chapter 10 exercises
Chapter 11 exercises
Chapter 13 exercises
Chapter 14 exercises
Chapter 15 exercises
Chapter 16 exercises
Chapter 17 exercises
Index
- No. of pages: 976
- Language: English
- Edition: 1
- Published: January 25, 2012
- Imprint: Morgan Kaufmann
- Hardback ISBN: 9780123852410
- eBook ISBN: 9780123852427
RH
Rex Hartson
Rex Hartson is a pioneer researcher, teacher, and practitioner-consultant in HCI and UX. He is the founding faculty member of HCI (in 1979) in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. With Deborah Hix, he was co-author of one of the first books to emphasize the usability engineering process, Developing user interfaces: Ensuring usability through product & process. Hartson has been principle investigator or co-PI at Virginia Tech on a large number of research grants and has published many journal articles, conference papers, and book chapters. He has presented many tutorials, invited lectures, workshops, seminars, and international talks. He was editor or co-editor for Advances in Human-Computer Interaction, Volumes 1-4, Ablex Publishing Co., Norwood, NJ. His HCI practice is grounded in over 30 years of consulting and user experience engineering training for dozens of clients in business, industry, government, and the military.
Affiliations and expertise
Professor Emeritus, Computer Science, Virginia Tech, USAPP
Pardha S. Pyla
Pardha Pyla is an award-winning designer and product strategist with deep expertise in envisioning and delivering industry-leading products. He is the founding member of multiple thriving product and design (UX) practices that were responsible for producing successful enterprise software solutions in use across many industries. He is a pioneering researcher in the area of coordinating software engineering and UX lifecycle processes and the author of several peer-reviewed research publications in human-computer interaction and software engineering. He has received numerous awards in recognition of his work in design thinking, research, teaching, leadership, and service.
Affiliations and expertise
Senior User Experience Specialist and Lead Interaction Designer for Mobile Platforms, Bloomberg LP, USARead The UX Book on ScienceDirect