User Centered Design: An Integrated Approach (Software quality institute)

User Centered Design: An Integrated Approach (Software quality institute)

by Carol Righi (Author), KarelVredenburg (Author), ScottIsensee (Author)

Synopsis

The start-to-finish guide to User-Centered Design! *Make technology products easy to obtain, learn, and use *New methods, tools, technologies, and real-world case studies *A complete lifecycle approach to UCD that delivers breakthrough efficiency *Evaluating your current products and aligning your entire organization to support UCD *Improving everything your customers see, hear, and touch *Applying UCD to software, hardware, Web sites, and services for both external and in-house use *Optimizing UCD today-and anticipating trends that will impact tomorrow's products It's this simple: User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach will help you build products that customers will love-and buy!

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 288
Edition: 1
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Published: 13 Dec 2001

ISBN 10: 0130912956
ISBN 13: 9780130912954
Book Overview:

User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach will help you optimize your customers' total experience with any technology product or service - from purchase and installation through support, upgrades, and beyond. Karel Vredenburg, Scott Isensee, and Carol Righi, the field's leading experts, present methods, techniques, case studies, and CD-ROM-based tools for introducing, deploying, and optimizing UCD to make products that are simpler, more elegant, more powerful, and more profitable.


Media Reviews

This book presents not only innovative coverage of the core issues of User-Centered Design, but also a forward-looking perspective on the entire user experience. Furthermore, the authors have done a masterful job of illustrating each UCD principle with compelling examples from their collective experience in making it happen!

-Larry Wood
Professor, Brigham Young University,
Author of User Interface Design,
Vice President of the Usability Professionals' Association

Great book! As a consultant working with both small and large companies to justify, build, and promote the user-centered design process, this book is the blueprint to follow to get it right. It defines the entire UCD process and offers insightful case studies from successful companies and products. This book is necessary reading for executives, project teams, developers, and interface designers.

-Theo Mandel, Ph.D.
Interface Design and Development
author of The Elements of User Interface Design

Some good usability efforts have failed because they did not recognize the need to focus on the competition. It's about time we've had a book about how usability activities strategically relate to business, competitiveness, and making money. Insights and examples here can help you if you are starting a usability group or are or part of an established one.

-Kara Pernice Coyne
Director of Research
Nielsen Norman Group

This book provides an engaging mixture of UCD, change management,organizational strategy, and marketing communications advice presentedthrough pragmatic case studies that show the authors' deep understanding and experience. I recommend this as a mandatory guidebook for all UCD practitioners. At last, a primer on how to succeed in getting UCD operationally engaged.

-Tom MacTavish
Vice President and Director
Human Interface Laboratories
Motorola Labs

This book will tool up the emerging usability professional, and will round out the experienced one. Karel, Scott, and Carol have done a great and thorough job of teaching the methods that defineusability engineering, and of placing them in a meaningful context oforganizational structures, finite development resources, politicalconsiderations, and communications challenges. This book demonstratesuser-centered design to be a true and invaluable sub-discipline of software engineering, on par with programming, quality assurance, technical writing, marketing.

-Randolph G. Bias, Ph.D.,
Chief Usability Officer,
Austin
Usability

It has taken State Farm many years to develop a successful UCD/Usability program. Through years of trial and error, we developed, validated, and implemented many of the procedures and suggestions presented in this book. If this book were available at the start of our journey, we may have been able to develop a successful UCD/Usability program much more quickly and with much less pain. While most companies will need to modify the roadmap slightly to meet their own unique set of circumstances, it is, none-the-less an excellent foundation on which to build a solid UCD/Usability program.

-Jack Means
Usability/Research Administrator
State Farm Insurance
Bloomington, Illinois

If you are in the business of designing products or services that people use, and customer satisfaction is one of your critical objectives, then read this book. It provides a rich resource that will help both promote the UCD message, and implement sound 'state of the art' practice.

-Ian McClelland
Philips Consumer Electronics

For those who are committed to customer satisfaction, this book clearly spells out what to do, from the organization, to the project, to the individual level, to achieve products that work better for customers. It explains the realities of creating customer-centered products, under real business constraints. I'm sure that this book will not only be on our shelves, it will be recommended for all of our clients!

-Julie Nowicki
President
Optavia Corporation

Ok, you've now proved there are usability problems with the products, and, some of these usability problems stem from deeper problems with the business model and the way the organization is structured. This is the deeper challenge. Yes, you have the organization's interest for UCD, but it's a constant challenge to help the business units and the organization as a whole understand the unrealized value if it does not have UCD. I found this book very practical and helpful because it contains real-life business lessons learned that are useful to help you succeed in your organization.

-Mary Lytwyn
Bank of Montreal

Author Bio

THE AUTHORS have used this book's techniques to design everything from mainframe computers to the Olympics Web site.

KAREL VREDENBURG, Architect and Corporate Champion for User-Centered Design at IBM, led the creation of the integrated version of UCD presented in this book.

SCOTT ISENSEE, user interface architect at BMC Software, is a former senior member of IBM's user interface architecture group. He holds 42 U.S. patents, and is co-author of The Art of Rapid Prototyping.

CAROL RIGHI, President of Righi Interface Engineering, Inc., has worked in HCI since 1984 and specializes in user-interface design and design education.

The authors run a popular workshop series titled Practical UCD: How to Introduce, Deploy, and Optimize User-Centered Design.