The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience

The UX Book, winner of a 2013 Most Promising New Textbook Award from the Text and Academic Authors Association, is a comprehensive textbook on designing interaction to ensure a quality user experience. Combining breadth, depth, and practical applications, this book takes a time-tested process-and-guidelines approach that provides readers with actionable methods and techniques while retaining a firm grounding in human-computer interaction (HCI) concepts and theory.

The authors will guide you through the UX lifecycle process, including contextual inquiry and analysis, requirements extraction, design ideation and creation, practical design production, prototyping, and UX evaluation. Development activities are linked via handoffs between stages as practitioners move through the process. The lifecycle template concept introduced in this book can be tailored to any project environment, from large enterprise system development to commercial products.

Students and practitioners alike will come away with understanding of how to create and refine interaction designs to ensure a quality user experience.

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

Table of Contents:

Chapter 1: Introduction
Part I: Process
Chapter 2: The Wheel: A Lifecycle Template
Chapter 3: Contextual Inquiry: Eliciting Work Activity Data
Chapter 4: Contextual Analysis: Consolidating and Interpreting Work Activity Data
Chapter 5: Extracting Interaction Design Requirements
Chapter 6: Constructing Design-Informing Models
Chapter 7: Design Thinking, Ideation and Sketching
Chapter 8: Mental Models and Conceptual Design
Chapter 9: Design Production
Chapter 10: UX Goals, Metrics and Targets
Chapter 11: Prototyping
Chapter 12: UX Evaulation Introduction
Chapter 13: Rapid Evaluation Methods
Chapter 14: Rigorous Empirical Evaluation: Preparation
Chapter 15: Rigorous Empirical Evaluation: Running the Session
Chapter 16: Rigorous Empirical Evaluation: Analysis
Chapter 17: Evaluation Reporting
Chapter 18: Wrapping up Rigorous UX Evaluation
Chapter 19: UX Methods for Agile Development
Part II: Design Infrastructure Guidelines
Chapter 20: Affordances Demystified
Chapter 21: The Interaction Cycle and the User Action Framework
Chapter 22: UX Design Guidelines
Part III: Advanced Topics
Chapter 23: Connections with Software Engineering
Chapter 24: Making it Work in the Real World