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

Few books in the field of human-computer interaction offer such a comprehensive, logical overview of contemporary methods and processes like this one. The authors do an excellent job of distilling HCI techniques into a form that is digestible for newcomers to the field; showing where, when, why, and how requirements gathering, design, prototyping and evaluation should be done.

Whether you're aware of it or not, you are following some sort of process when you design and build a product. This book outlines many of those processes and cycles in clear detail, offering advice as to how you can use such processes to your advantage, and how to improve your current processes. Moreover, the authors describe how to practice HCI in the field with applied techniques ranging from understanding your users' needs to creating paper prototypes and wireframes.

The UX Book also talks about how user experience fits into organizations and how to apply UX design in different organizational contexts. For example, an organization that has a strong software engineering culture will need to approach UX differently from one that has business analysts setting product direction.

Consider this book HCI 101 for students interested in the field or for practitioners who want some formalized background to understand how what they do fits into the larger scope of what UX tries to accomplish. This book does not offer advice on how to become a Photoshop master nor does it offer detail about JavaScript development for high-fidelity prototyping. And unfortunately, because UX is such a broad term, some may mistake this book as a guide for learning about interaction design in detail. Those caveats in mind, this book is second to none if you're interested in learning how to practice HCI methods and how many seemingly abstract academic HCI techniques can work in the real world.

I picked this up with a lot of excitement; I teach and mentor in the field and have long been looking for something that could become the seminal textbook as opposed to the assortment of books I currently need to assign or recommend to really cover the bases. At first glance this book looks wonderful--it is obviously written by authors with deep expertise, I love that it is geared to active learning with the inclusion of exercises, it is thoughtfully organized. As I scanned through the table of contents an alarm bell went off in my mind, however--how could a book purporting to be a comprehensive guide to designing effective user experiences (which primarily still means designing effective user interfaces) fail to include information architecture? This strikes me as a really egregious oversight.

Some books on the topic don't use the term "information architecture" but they still delve deeply into organization, navigation, content strategy, and other critical elements that information architecture encompasses. I'm always disappointed when the term "information architecture" isn't used, as I consider it the best and most widely understood term for capturing this unique set of components--but a rose by any other name still smells as sweet, so I can cope without the term as long as the concepts are there. I don't think that is really the case with this text, however. There is a (thin) chapter on mental models that imperfectly and partially covers this territory--and that is about it.

In reality, this book is an extensive usability evaluation techniques book (and from that aspect it appears to be a very good one) that also includes information on user research techniques and a chapter on prototyping. This is not a comprehensive user experience design text and I would not recommend it as such given that such critical content is absent. I would go as far as to say that students using this book and no other would come away dangerously misguided about what is required to create truly good user interfaces and user experiences.

Another reader that I discussed this with acknowledged that it is troubling that IA is missing in both name and form but encouraged me to appreciate that the book is pretty good at everything else it covers and great at many. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but that seems a bit like saying that we should appreciate an anatomy text for its brilliant coverage of the nervous system, muscles, and organs, and overlook the fact that the skeleton is missing. And that's why I feel that this book can't warrant even a 3 star review.

In a world where user experience is often regarded as an after-thought or a "nice to have," this book really makes the case for a comprehensive and integrated approach to building interactive systems. If you want to convince someone on your team about the importance of user experience, you will find many talking points in this book. If you yourself want to learn about user experience, and why it is absolutely essential, buy this book.

Much of user experience in practice is at the overlap of psychology, design, and software engineering. A lot of UX books are heavy on the psychology side, and speak to an academic audience. Talking about abstract theories from psychology may not translate well among the software development team. This book helps bridge that gap by talking about UX in a common sense way. The book presents Wheel, a process to "ensure a quality user experience" in a systematic software-engineering-like that developers can relate to and apply.

Try this: When you run into a UX challenge at work, don't pull the book off the shelf... but really think of how YOU would approach that problem. THEN go back and read the book. You will see how much it rings true. You would digest the material and remember it better, that way. If you just read it cover to cover without a real problem to solve in your mind, you might not feel the true impact of the book. You might think "yeah - what's the big deal about a bunch of post-it notes on a wall or sketching dozens of design ideas when only one will be used?" But if you tried approaching the problem yourself first, you'd appreciate the value of the methods suggested in the book.

Actionable, practical, down-to-earth advice for students and practitioners, with some humor too! GRAB THIS BOOK!