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The UX Book

Agile UX Design for a Quality User Experience

The discipline of user experience (UX) design has matured into a confident practice and this edition reflects, and in some areas accelerates, that evolution. Technically this is th… Read more

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Description

The discipline of user experience (UX) design has matured into a confident practice and this edition reflects, and in some areas accelerates, that evolution. Technically this is the second edition of The UX Book, but so much of it is new, it is more like a sequel.

One of the major positive trends in UX is the continued emphasis on design—a kind of design that highlights the designer’s creative skills and insights and embodies a synthesis of technology with usability, usefulness, aesthetics, and meaningfulness to the user. In this edition a new conceptual top-down design framework is introduced to help readers with this evolution.

This entire edition is oriented toward an agile UX lifecycle process, explained in the funnel model of agile UX, as a better match to the now de facto standard agile approach to software engineering. To reflect these trends, even the subtitle of the book is changed to “Agile UX design for a quality user experience”.

Designed as a how-to-do-it handbook and field guide for UX professionals and a textbook for aspiring students, the book is accompanied by in-class exercises and team projects.

The approach is practical rather than formal or theoretical. The primary goal is still to imbue an understanding of what a good user experience is and how to achieve it. To better serve this, processes, methods, and techniques are introduced early to establish process-related concepts as context for discussion in later chapters.

Key features

  • Winner of a 2020 Textbook Excellence Award (College) (Texty) from the Textbook and Academic Authors Association
  • A comprehensive textbook for UX/HCI/Interaction Design students readymade for the classroom, complete with instructors’ manual, dedicated web site, sample syllabus, examples, exercises, and lecture slides
  • Features HCI theory, process, practice, and a host of real world stories and contributions from industry luminaries to prepare students for working in the field
  • The only HCI textbook to cover agile methodology, design approaches, and a full, modern suite of classroom material (stemming from tried and tested classroom use by the authors)

Readership

Graduate and undergraduate students in user experience and UX design courses, UX practitioners, software engineers, programmers, and software testers

Table of contents

PART 1. INTRODUCTION

1. What is UX and UX design?

2. The Wheel: UX processes, lifecycles, methods, and technique

3. Scope, rigor, complexity, and project perspectives

4. Agile lifecycle processes and the Funnel Model of Agile UX

5. Prelude to the process chapters

6. Background: Introduction

PART 2. UNDERSTAND NEEDS

7. Usage research data elicitation

8. Usage research data analysis

9. Usage research data modeling

10. UX design requirements: User stories and requirements

11. Background: Understand Needs

PART 3. DESIGN SOLUTIONS

12. The nature of UX design

13. Bottom-up vs. top-down design

14. Generative design: Ideation, sketching, and critiquing

15. Mental models and conceptual design

16. Designing the ecology and a pervasive information architecture

17. Designing the interaction

18. Designing for emotional impact

19. Background: Design

PART 4. PROTOTYPE CANDIDATES

20. Prototyping

PART 5. EVALUATE UX

21. UX evaluation methods and techniques

22. UX evaluation: UX goals, metrics, and targets

23. Preparation for empirical UX evaluation

24. Empirical data collection methods and techniques

25. Analytical data collection methods and techniques

26. UX Evaluation: Data analysis

27. UX evaluation: Reporting results

28. Background: UX evaluation

PART 6. AGILE UX AND CONNECTIONS TO AGILE SE

29. Connecting agile UX with agile software development

30. Background: Agile connections

PART 7. AFFORDANCES AND DESIGN GUIDELINES

31. Affordances in UX design

32. The interaction cycle

33. UX design guidelines

34. Background: Affordances and UX design principles

Product details

About the authors

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, USA

PP

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, USA

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