A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making [Paperback]

Russ Unger (Author), Carolyn Chandler (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0321607376 | ISBN-13: 978-0321607379 | Publication Date: March 23, 2009 | Edition: 1

“If you are a young designer entering or contemplating entering the UX field this is a canonical book. If you are an organization that really needs to start grokking UX this book is also for you. "  -- Chris Bernard, User Experience Evangelist, Microsoft

User experience design is the discipline of creating a useful and usable Web site or application—one that’s easily navigated and meets the needs of both the site owner and its users. But there’s a lot more to successful UX design than knowing the latest Web technologies or design trends: It takes diplomacy, project management skills, and business savvy. That’s where this book comes in. Authors Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler show you how to integrate UX principles into your project from start to finish.

• Understand the various roles in UX design, identify stakeholders, and enlist their support
• Obtain consensus from your team on project objectives
• Define the scope of your project and avoid mission creep
• Conduct user research and document your findings
• Understand and communicate user behavior with personas
• Design and prototype your application or site
• Make your product findable with search engine optimization
• Plan for development, product rollout, and ongoing quality assurance

Editorial Reviews

Review

“If you are a young designer entering or contemplating entering the UX field this is a canonical book. If you are an organization that really needs to start grokking UX this book is also for you. "
 
Chris Bernard, User Experience Evangelist, Microsoft
 

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: New Riders Press; 1 edition (March 23, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321607376
• ISBN-13: 978-0321607379
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #14,707 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #16 in Books > Business & Investing > Management & Leadership > Project Management
  • #22 in Books > Computers & Technology > Project Management > PMP Exam
  • #24 in Books > Computers & Technology > Business & Culture > Manager's Guides to Computing

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent UX resource, April 1, 2009

By 

John McSwain "Compound J" (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making (Paperback)

A Project Guide to UX Design is a book that defines the micro and macroscopic views of user experience design and its role in the project life cycle. Russ and Carolyn do a great job of reiterating what the core of user experience design is as well as identifying the different roles that utilize it. The book covers a lot of ground and takes a transcendental approach of showing the underlying purpose for each role in order to promote a synthetic comprehension of user experience design as opposed to shallow memorization.

The main target audience of the book are Information Architects, Interaction Designers, User Researchers, and other project stakeholders (Business Analysts, Content Strategists, Copywriters, Visual Designers, and Front-end Developers).

To make the contents more inviting, I've created an enclosing outline to provide abstract classifications for several groups of chapters. Each number represents the number of pages in each chapter:

+ Introduction
- Chapter 1: The Tao of UXD (8)
- Chapter 2: The Project Ecosystem (29)

+ Business Perspective
- Chapter 3: Proposals for Consultants and Freelancers (15)
- Chapter 4: Project Objectives and Approach (10)
- Chapter 5: Business Requirements (15)

+ Research
- Chapter 6: User Research (26)
- Chapter 7: Personas (13)
- Chapter 8: User Experience Design and SEO (17)

+ Information Architecture / Interaction Design
- Chapter 9: Transition from Defining to Designing (18)
- Chapter 10: Site Maps and Task Flows (17)
- Chapter 11: Wireframes and Annotations (17)
- Chapter 12: Prototyping (15)
- Chapter 13: Design testing with Users (25)
- Chapter 14: Transition: From Design to Development and Beyond (10)

The book also contains frequent references to books, online resources, and user experience groups and authors throughout as opposed to an Appendix or a 'For further reading' section nested in the back. This helps to drive home the thoughts as you read them, rather than 'when you are finished'.

As an aspiring user experience professional, I do believe that this book is worth owning, reading, and referencing as a compass to create effective user experience in any project setting.

30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Tool for Anyone who Cares About the User Experience, May 20, 2009

By 

Joe Sokohl "Books, Bikes, and Blue States" (Richmond, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making (Paperback)

Length:: 2:10 Mins

A great overview of user experience project approaches. This book provides insight as well as practicalities to both novice and experienced UX project team members.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Lot of vague, managerial newspeak, very little actual UX meat, August 11, 2010

By 

Martin S. - See all my reviews

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This review is from: A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making (Paperback)

If you want a book about UX design, this is NOT it.

This book deals not with the UX design, but mainly with the process of selling UX design services. You will learn very little if anything about the actual UX design process you haven't read elsewhere, but you will learn a lot of useless vague things like how to create a proposal, that a written contract is important, and that you have to "gather ideas from stakeholders" (duh!).
The book is full of empty managerial words like "gather, facilitate, manage, provide insight", but contains very little actual UX meat. For example there are subchapters called "Solidify Project Objectives", "Outline Responsibilities" or "Prioritize and Define". There is even a chapter called simply "Facilitating".
Even if you can stomach such vague language, you will be disappointed with the content. The actual content regarding UX design is barely fifty-something pages - including a weak chapter on SEO.

If you want not to "facilitate and prioritize" but to get some work done, look elsewhere. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web or S. Krug's books were much more helpful for me in this regard.