Usability Success Stories

Usability Success Stories
Author: Paul Sherman
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2016-02-11
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1317003160

People spend increasing amounts of time and effort interacting with complex hardware and software products. Some of the products we interact with are easy to learn and easy to remember. Some are even a pleasure to use. Others are hard to learn, hard to use, and frustrate us at every turn. But it is not just the user that pays the cost in such cases. Poor usability also imposes significant costs on product producers. Companies that make hard-to-use products incur higher support costs, spend more on rework, and have less satisfied customers. These outcomes can be avoided by applying the techniques of usability engineering and user-centred design (UCD) during product development. This book shows how usability and UCD practitioners do this by studying users' needs and abilities, designing the product accordingly, and verifying the design through additional testing with users. Despite the positive return on investment for usability engineering activities, many organizations view usability engineering as a non-critical part of the product development process. This book seeks to change this by relating a number of cases where usability engineering contributed significantly to the solution of a business problem. Evidence is drawn from experiences within a range of private and public sector organizations showing how usability work can best be organized and executed within a business environment. The organizational factors that facilitate or impede the application of usability engineering are also discussed. The book clearly explains the barriers to be overcome as well as highlighting the factors promoting success. A wide range of applications are covered, including web-based e-commerce, medical devices and software, process control management systems, financial services applications, consumer desktop applications and interactive voice response systems. Usability Success Stories provides a valuable guide for business managers and technical staff as well as for practitioners within the field itself.

Successful User Experience: Strategies and Roadmaps

Successful User Experience: Strategies and Roadmaps
Author: Elizabeth Rosenzweig
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2015-08-03
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0128010614

Successful User Experience: Strategy and Roadmaps provides you with a hands-on guide for pulling all of the User Experience (UX) pieces together to create a strategy that includes tactics, tools, and methodologies. Leveraging material honed in user experience courses and over 25 years in the field, the author explains the value of strategic models to refine goals against available data and resources. You will learn how to think about UX from a high level, design the UX while setting goals for a product or project, and how to turn that into concrete actionable steps. After reading this book, you'll understand: - How to bring high-level planning into concrete actionable steps - How Design Thinking relates to creating a good UX - How to set UX Goals for a product or project - How to decide which tool or methodology to use at what point in product lifecycle This book takes UX acceptance as a point of departure, and builds on it with actionable steps and case studies to develop a complete strategy, from the big picture of product design, development and commercialization, to how UX can help create stronger products. This is a must-have book for your complete UX library. - Uses strategic models that focus product design and development - Teaches how to decipher what tool or methodology is right for a given moment, project, or a specific team - Presents tactics on how to understand how to connect the dots between tools, data, and design - Provides actionable steps and case studies that help users develop a complete strategy, from the big picture of product design, development, and commercialization, to how UX can help create stronger products - Case studies in each chapter to aid learning

Measuring the User Experience

Measuring the User Experience
Author: Bill Albert
Publisher: Newnes
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2013-05-23
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0124157920

Measuring the User Experience was the first book that focused on how to quantify the user experience. Now in the second edition, the authors include new material on how recent technologies have made it easier and more effective to collect a broader range of data about the user experience. As more UX and web professionals need to justify their design decisions with solid, reliable data, Measuring the User Experience provides the quantitative analysis training that these professionals need. The second edition presents new metrics such as emotional engagement, personas, keystroke analysis, and net promoter score. It also examines how new technologies coming from neuro-marketing and online market research can refine user experience measurement, helping usability and user experience practitioners make business cases to stakeholders. The book also contains new research and updated examples, including tips on writing online survey questions, six new case studies, and examples using the most recent version of Excel. - Learn which metrics to select for every case, including behavioral, physiological, emotional, aesthetic, gestural, verbal, and physical, as well as more specialized metrics such as eye-tracking and clickstream data - Find a vendor-neutral examination of how to measure the user experience with web sites, digital products, and virtually any other type of product or system - Discover in-depth global case studies showing how organizations have successfully used metrics and the information they revealed - Companion site, www.measuringux.com, includes articles, tools, spreadsheets, presentations, and other resources to help you effectively measure the user experience

Cost-Justifying Usability

Cost-Justifying Usability
Author: Randolph G. Bias
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Total Pages: 703
Release: 2005-04-04
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0120958112

Advice from the experts on how to justify time and money spent on usability!

Game Usability

Game Usability
Author: Katherine Isbister
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2008-08-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0080922422

Computers used to be for geeks. And geeks were fine with dealing with a difficult and finicky interface--they liked this--it was even a sort of badge of honor (e.g. the Unix geeks). But making the interface really intuitive and useful--think about the first Macintosh computers--took computers far far beyond the geek crowd. The Mac made HCI (human c

User-Centered Design Stories

User-Centered Design Stories
Author: Carol Righi
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 688
Release: 2010-07-27
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0080481558

User-Centered Design Stories is the first user-centered design casebook with cases covering the key tasks and issues facing UCD practitioners today. Intended for both students and practitioners, this book follows the Harvard Case study method, where the reader is placed in the role of the decision-maker in a real-life professional situation. In this book, the reader is asked to analyze dozens of UCD work situations and propose solutions for the problem set. The problems posed in the cases cover a wide variety of key tasks and issues faced by practitioners, including those related to organizational/managerial topics, UCD methods and processes, and technical/ project issues. The benefit of the casebook and its organization is that it offers new practitioners (as well as experienced practitioners working in new settings) valuable practice in decision-making that cannot be obtained by simply reading a book or attending a seminar. - The first User-Centered Design Casebook, with cases covering the key tasks and issues facing UCD practitioners today. - Each chapter based on real world cases with complex problems, giving readers as close to a real-world experience as possible. - Offers "the things you don't learn in school," such as innovative and hybrid solutions that were actually used on the problems discussed.

Usability Engineering

Usability Engineering
Author: Mary Beth Rosson
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2002
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1558607129

Usability engineering is about designing products that are easy to use. This text provides an introduction to human computer interaction principles, and how to apply them in ways that make software and hardware more effective and easier to use.

Handbook of Usability Testing

Handbook of Usability Testing
Author: Jeffrey Rubin
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2011-03-10
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1118080408

Whether it's software, a cell phone, or a refrigerator, your customer wants - no, expects - your product to be easy to use. This fully revised handbook provides clear, step-by-step guidelines to help you test your product for usability. Completely updated with current industry best practices, it can give you that all-important marketplace advantage: products that perform the way users expect. You'll learn to recognize factors that limit usability, decide where testing should occur, set up a test plan to assess goals for your product's usability, and more.

Forms that Work

Forms that Work
Author: Caroline Jarrett
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2009-03-02
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0080948480

Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability clearly explains exactly how to design great forms for the web. The book provides proven and practical advice that will help you avoid pitfalls, and produce forms that are aesthetically pleasing, efficient and cost-effective. It features invaluable design methods, tips, and tricks to help ensure accurate data and satisfied customers. It includes dozens of examples - from nitty-gritty details (label alignment, mandatory fields) to visual designs (creating good grids, use of color). This book isn't just about colons and choosing the right widgets. It's about the whole process of making good forms, which has a lot more to do with making sure you're asking the right questions in a way that your users can answer than it does with whether you use a drop-down list or radio buttons. In an easy-to-read format with lots of examples, the authors present their three-layer model - relationship, conversation, appearance. You need all three for a successful form - a form that looks good, flows well, asks the right questions in the right way, and, most important of all, gets people to fill it out. Liberally illustrated with full-color examples, this book guides readers on how to define requirements, how to write questions that users will understand and want to answer, and how to deal with instructions, progress indicators and errors. This book is essential reading for HCI professionals, web designers, software developers, user interface designers, HCI academics and students, market research professionals, and financial professionals. *Provides proven and practical advice that will help you avoid pitfalls, and produce forms that are aesthetically pleasing, efficient and cost-effective. *Features invaluable design methods, tips, and tricks to help ensure accurate data and satisfied customers. *Includes dozens of examples -- from nitty-gritty details (label alignment, mandatory fields) to visual designs (creating good grids, use of color).*Foreword by Steve Krug, author of the best selling Don't Make Me Think!

Designing Usability into Medical Products

Designing Usability into Medical Products
Author: Michael E. Wiklund
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2005-02-11
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1040063756

Advocating a user-centered approach to medical technology design, Designing Usability into Medical Products covers the essential processes and specific techniques necessary to produce safe, effective, usable, and appealing medical systems and products. Written by experts on user-centered research, design, and evaluation, the book provides a range o