The UX Book,
Edition 1 Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience
By Rex Hartson and Pardha S. Pyla

Publication Date: 17 Feb 2012
Description
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 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.

Key Features

  • 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
About the author
By Rex Hartson, Professor Emeritus, Computer Science, Virginia Tech and Pardha S. Pyla, Senior User Experience Specialist and Lead Interaction Designer for Mobile Platforms, Bloomberg LP
Table of Contents

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

Book details
ISBN: 9780123852410
Page Count: 976
Retail Price : £65.00

Stone, User Interface Design and Evaluation, 9780120884360, $75.95. 704pg, MK 2005. Bookscan: 1240

Instructor Resources
Audience
UX practitioners, software engineers, programmers, and software testers. Graduate and Undergraduate students in user experience and UX design courses