Observing the User Experience: A Practitioners Guide to User Research

Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research aims to bridge the gap between what digital companies think they know about their users and the actual user experience. Individuals engaged in digital product and service development often fail to conduct user research. The book presents concepts and techniques to provide an understanding of how people experience products and services. The techniques are drawn from the worlds of human-computer interaction, marketing, and social sciences.

The book is organized into three parts. Part I discusses the benefits of end-user research and the ways it fits into the development of useful, desirable, and successful products. Part II presents techniques for understanding people’s needs, desires, and abilities. Part III explains the communication and application of research results. It suggests ways to sell companies and explains how user-centered design can make companies more efficient and profitable. This book is meant for people involved with their products’ user experience, including program managers, designers, marketing managers, information architects, programmers, consultants, and investors.

Explains how to create usable products that are still original, creative, and uniqueA valuable resource for designers, developers, project managers - anyone in a position where their work comes in direct contact with the end userProvides a real-world perspective on research and provides advice about how user research can be done cheaply, quickly and how results can be presented persuasivelyGives readers the tools and confidence to perform user research on their own designs and tune their software user experience to the unique needs of their product and its users

Part I: Why Research is Good and How It Fits Into Product Development
1. Typhoon: A Fable
2. Do a Usability Test Now!
3. Balancing Needs Through Iterative Development
4. The User Experience

Part II: User Experience Research Techniques
5. The Research Plan
6. Universal tools: Recruiting and Interviewing
7. User Profiles
8. Contextual Inquiry, Task Analysis, Card Sorting
9. Focus Groups
10. Usability Tests
11. Surveys
12. Ongoing Relationship
13. Log Files and Customer Support
14. Competitive Research
15. Others' Hard Work: Published Information and Consultants
16. Emerging Techniques

Part III: Communicating Results
17. Reports and Presentations
18. Creating a User-Centered Corporate Culture

Appendices
A. The Budget Research Lab
B. Common Survey Questions
C. Observer Instructions