Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's a crisp overview of all the foundational activities that you'll encounter as a UX professional.

If you've been practicing and in the UX field for a few years and want a good gut check to answer the question, "Am I doing this right" this is the book for you too. I don't think it will teach experienced professionals anything they don't already know but then again I don't think that was the goal of the book.

UX Design is really focused on how the work of UX designer gets done day to day and its focus on topics that some UX folks ignore, but are critical, like SEO and contract creation are refreshing. The best analogy I can think of regarding this book is that it reminds me of the excellent professional practice guides that the AIGA used to put out years ago.

There's a natural Web focus in this book but folks that are in the UX discipline in any realm should find it useful and perhaps essential reading.

Despite the title, this book looks to me to be clearly aimed at those just starting out, both in UX design and in design/development in general. A product or software development veteran is going to get very, very little new information out of this book, even if said veteran is light on UX design. Given that assessment, I am not happy with the subtitle about the book being for UX designers in the field. It's just not.

I struggled to find anything covered in the book that I didn't already know, and got perhaps one or two marginally useful ideas. The book is pretty thin to start with, and after you finish getting through the obvious and common sense observations/recommendations aimed at rank beginners, there just isn't much left.

If you have experience and want more depth on UX, particularly for software design/development, I think a good alternative to consider is Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services. It's a much thicker book, and while it contains some of the beginner stuff too, it goes well beyond it.

If this book's title had made it clear that the audience was UX design noobs, and if I had wandered across it in a reference section or something, I would have rated it higher. I'm sure they wanted to try and expand the audience, and created a title with that in mind, but quite candidly, I feel cheated by this book because I got so little out of it.

This book is phenomenal. Having worked in Human Factors designing User Interfaces for quite a few years, seldom have I seen a broad overview that gets it. You won't find exacting details or templates of how to do each step of the UX task, but you will get a complete sense of what you should be doing at each step you find yourself. There is enough information in this book to really get you started. Also if you already knee deep in a project, you can jump to that point.

I read the book cover to cover and put over 20 tabs on the book for the references they have provided on the web. I checked quite a few and they are a gold mine of info.

I like this book because of its broader appeal. If you sit down and read a text that goes into excruciating detail before you are ready to use that information, reading becomes laborious and you don't retain it. Or you bail on the book and never get the overall picture.
This book is a nice balance of the full picture and the ability to get the detail.

Mind you, when I say it does not go into detail that might be a bit misleading. For instance, when in the section about Search engine Optimization, it helped explain this concept in enough detail that I had a clue what the issues were when dealing with an advertizing firm. Sure enough there were links listed here to provide even more detail. The User research and persona usage was very up-to-date regarding how these would be used and why you might use varying degrees of details. In the section about Wireframes and Annotations, there were good examples and advice as well as links to get more. The User testing section had interesting information that was very current as well. I could go on and on, but the book speaks for itself. You can view the Table of Contents online.

Another thing and it is not a small one, the book is well designed for reading. The font is pleasant and the layout is efficient and provides cues for both "Surfing" and "Deep Dives" of information. In fact they provide sections called Surfing, Snorkeling and Deep Diving, which is very helpful. Nice when a book practice what it preaches and makes itself as usable as the products it's meant to help design.

This book is going on my desk for reference and has been recommended to colleagues.

This is an excellent real-world primer on UX design that captures all the necessary elements for someone to become a competent UX designer. It strikes the right balance between revealing better design practices with the most effective project management approach which is often omitted in books in the same category.

I'm not sure who the audience for this book is, but it is very simplistic and general. They do note that UX design is a "field in the making", so at least it is qualified in the title. When I got to the section on how to write a proposal, I had to make sure I was reading a book about UX. I would have expected a "deeper dive" into examples and processes of UX design. This may be useful for the beginning designer or architect, but as someone with over 16 years experience in the web, it did not provide deep enough information.

Like most of my professional peers, I came into User Experience through a strange and varied path. This allowed me to learn a great deal but randomly and often slowly. What Russ and Carolyn have done with this book is to distill years of hard-earned experience into digestible, friendly lessons. 'A Project Guide to UX Design' arms the up and coming UX practitioner with the right amount of information to begin as well as springboards to deeper territory.

This book, paired with Kim Goodwin's 'Designing for the Digital Age', forms the 100 and 200 (respectively) levels of UX Foundation Education. I am more than a tiny bit envious of newibe UXers who get to benefit from Russ & Carolyn's experience!

This book provides an easily digestible overview for anyone new to the UX field or looking to refine their UX process. Most beneficial for new practitioners may be the chapters related to the overarching aspects of the redesign process, such as writing proposals and creating personas. While these activities may or may not be done by the UX designer, it's critical to begin a project with the solid understanding of where and how the design parameters were obtained.

As an IA professional who is newISH (3 1/2 years) I actually was surprised to find the majority of the book too basic (though this had the benefit of boosting my confidence). My original expectation was that the book would cover more of what I consider to be the the core IA or UX design tasks, that actually result in client deliverables--site maps, wireframes, and prototypes. Having attended a workshop with Russ Unger and recognizing his expertise in this area I would look forward to a book focuses on developing and enhancing these skills.

That said, I was glad to find the majority of the book to be consistent with my practices and still found nuggets of information that will be beneficial as we continue to refine the website redesign process in my work environment. I will certainly make attempts to expose other team members to this content in a never ending attempt to convey the importance of user experience.