Communicating the User Experience
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Product Description
A clear and focused guide to creating useful user experience documentation
As web sites and applications become richer and more complex, the user experience (UX) becomes critical to their success. This indispensible and full–color book provides practical guidance on this growing field and shares valuable UX advice that you can put into practice immediately on your own projects. The authors examine why UX is gaining so much interest from web designers, graduates, and career changers and looks at the new UX tools and ideas that can help you do your job better. In addition, you′ll benefit from the unique insight the authors provide from their experiences of working with some of the world′s best–known companies, learning how to take ideas from business requirements, user research, and documentation to create and develop your UX vision.
- Explains how to create documentation that clearly communicates the vision for the UX design and the blueprint for how it′s going to be developed
- Provides practical guidance that you can put to work right away on their own projects
- Looks at the new UX tools and ideas that are born every day, aimed at helping you do your job better and more efficiently
- Covers a variety of topics including user journeys, task models, funnel diagrams, content audits, sitemaps, wireframes, interactive prototypes, and more
Communicating the User Experience is an ideal resource for getting started with creating UX documentation.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
This is a very practical book, loaded with tips and tricks that will allow you to communicate and present your research and design documentation more effectively to project stakeholders. Beginners and mid-weight UX practitioners alike will find this book immensely valuable, but I'm sure that even seasoned designers will find in it a few things that will help them improve their deliverables. Furthermore, if you want to apply principles of information design and visual thinking to your deliverables, this book will give you some ideas.
Deliverables design is an important skill, so if you take it seriously, make sure this book finds its way into your library.
Deliverables design is an important skill, so if you take it seriously, make sure this book finds its way into your library.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
13 reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Solid advice, but too specific on the format
16 April 2012
Format:Paperback|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
I wasn't quite sure what to expect in getting this book. As an experienced UI person, there is the constant juggle of documentation versus development. You can work with developers in an Agile environment on the fly, but what does QA test to? I was hoping this book addressed this new age question. It most certainly does not. But that is my mistake as this book does not suggest that will do that. Instead, I found a fairly basic book on UI, that deals with the earlier stages or more basic stages of UI development and how to document that.
Imagine you are a consultant or a UI person looking into a new website or application, or reviewing an old site to resolve some issues. It is this level of early documentation this book is discussing:
*Personas
*Task Models
*User Journeys
*Content Requirements
*Sitemaps
*Wireframes
*Usability Test Reports
*Funnel Diagrams
What I found surprising was the detailed instructions on how to create each of these items in various Software programs; mostly Omnigraffle or MS Powerpoint. There was some reference to Axure, MS Word and MS Excel as well, but they were in the minority.
Nearly half of this book (158 pages versus 332 overall) concerned itself with detailed instructions for how to create this documentation in a very specific format.
Since the Omnigraffle instructions were uniquely for an Apple system; 81 pages had instructions that I could not use. Having not had Axure available to me, another 15 were of no use either.
A concern, I have with all this specificity for a format, was, that it may not fit all circumstances. I get that it may been graphically pleasing to present information in this format for various situations, but it is also highly limiting. If you are consulting, their customer may have unique requests. Also if this graphical technique of representing data, was used by a prior consultant, it makes it seem unimaginative or non-customized for the clients circumstances.
Through the book, I did find sections that were repetitive, leading me to consider this a more basic text; however there were some great nuggets.
As an example in the section on Content requirements they appropriately point out the usefulness of testing with 5 users 5 times versus 25 users at the end, this is a time honored Human Factors tenant. Additionally in the Wireframe section, I liked the use of shading to portray visual heat in a section to help with the hierarchy of information. This is a simple way to be sure your locations of information and graphics are doing what they are supposed to.
In summary, this was a basic text on Human factors and User Experience documentation that will provide a framework and some sound guidance on how to design or redesign a site or application for a defined task. It also gives some very particular instructions on how to do this in a few very popular software programs.
Imagine you are a consultant or a UI person looking into a new website or application, or reviewing an old site to resolve some issues. It is this level of early documentation this book is discussing:
*Personas
*Task Models
*User Journeys
*Content Requirements
*Sitemaps
*Wireframes
*Usability Test Reports
*Funnel Diagrams
What I found surprising was the detailed instructions on how to create each of these items in various Software programs; mostly Omnigraffle or MS Powerpoint. There was some reference to Axure, MS Word and MS Excel as well, but they were in the minority.
Nearly half of this book (158 pages versus 332 overall) concerned itself with detailed instructions for how to create this documentation in a very specific format.
Since the Omnigraffle instructions were uniquely for an Apple system; 81 pages had instructions that I could not use. Having not had Axure available to me, another 15 were of no use either.
A concern, I have with all this specificity for a format, was, that it may not fit all circumstances. I get that it may been graphically pleasing to present information in this format for various situations, but it is also highly limiting. If you are consulting, their customer may have unique requests. Also if this graphical technique of representing data, was used by a prior consultant, it makes it seem unimaginative or non-customized for the clients circumstances.
Through the book, I did find sections that were repetitive, leading me to consider this a more basic text; however there were some great nuggets.
As an example in the section on Content requirements they appropriately point out the usefulness of testing with 5 users 5 times versus 25 users at the end, this is a time honored Human Factors tenant. Additionally in the Wireframe section, I liked the use of shading to portray visual heat in a section to help with the hierarchy of information. This is a simple way to be sure your locations of information and graphics are doing what they are supposed to.
In summary, this was a basic text on Human factors and User Experience documentation that will provide a framework and some sound guidance on how to design or redesign a site or application for a defined task. It also gives some very particular instructions on how to do this in a few very popular software programs.
Padded content - but useful info
4 May 2012
Format:Paperback|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
The book had some excellent content and ideas, however I felt it was overly padded with descriptions of how to use software tools to implement some of the prescriptions. For example is it really necessary to waste valuable print space with a picture showing you the drop-down menu for choosing round bullet points in Powerpoint? The real content of the book is about 70 pages out of the 323 that it actually has.
UX is a relatively new field so some of the terminology is not yet standardized, so some people may get confused if you start using some of the terms used in the book. For example user journeys are aka sagas or epics etc. It's a great introduction to the topic however that I think anyone in product development should read.
UX is a relatively new field so some of the terminology is not yet standardized, so some people may get confused if you start using some of the terms used in the book. For example user journeys are aka sagas or epics etc. It's a great introduction to the topic however that I think anyone in product development should read.
The User Experience of selling web sites, maybe over-explained
16 April 2012
Format:Paperback|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
Well, it's time to document the user experience, so turn on your computers and fire up OmniGraffle . . . what? OmniGraffle? You've probably never heard of OmniGraffle unless you work on the Mac.
And come to that, even if you have a Mac you may not have heard of it. I tried looking for it on-line and had problems finding it.
It wouldn't be an issue except that this book is largely built around instructions on how to use the software. You have a PC? There are instructions on using PowerPoint. From what I see, if you can use PowerPoint on a PC then you can use PowerPoint for Mac - so we get two platforms, needing only one set of instructions. If you don't like using PowerPoint, there is the Keynote application on the Mac. But when the largest part of the book is on how to use OmniGraffle, it would make sense to miss out this whole section and concentrate on applications people already have or can get easily. And to be honest, I would hope that no matter what software you use, you should understand the level at which these instructions operate.
Like other reviewers, I have had problems with the gray-on-gray design of the diagrams. It also might have been nice to have a real-world example of the whole process.
But other than my gripes, the remaining two-thirds of the book is good. I get the feeling that most of what you'd need to do was shown here. I wouldn't like to start a project based on this book alone, but you can bet that if did some User Experience work I'd be referring to it constantly.
Take a look.
And come to that, even if you have a Mac you may not have heard of it. I tried looking for it on-line and had problems finding it.
It wouldn't be an issue except that this book is largely built around instructions on how to use the software. You have a PC? There are instructions on using PowerPoint. From what I see, if you can use PowerPoint on a PC then you can use PowerPoint for Mac - so we get two platforms, needing only one set of instructions. If you don't like using PowerPoint, there is the Keynote application on the Mac. But when the largest part of the book is on how to use OmniGraffle, it would make sense to miss out this whole section and concentrate on applications people already have or can get easily. And to be honest, I would hope that no matter what software you use, you should understand the level at which these instructions operate.
Like other reviewers, I have had problems with the gray-on-gray design of the diagrams. It also might have been nice to have a real-world example of the whole process.
But other than my gripes, the remaining two-thirds of the book is good. I get the feeling that most of what you'd need to do was shown here. I wouldn't like to start a project based on this book alone, but you can bet that if did some User Experience work I'd be referring to it constantly.
Take a look.
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