Selling Usability: User Experience Infiltration Tactics [Paperback]

John Rhodes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 6, 2009

"Here's Why All Serious Usability Professionals Are Reading This Book Now" You no longer need to justify usability. Buy this book and learn how these underground tools allow you to easily sneak usability into any organization. These methods always work. * Discover how to help your organization easily increase profits with UX. * Learn how to avoid the selling mistakes that can kill your usability career. * Transform skeptics and the enemies of usability into powerful advocates. * Advance your career and boost your influence without doing marketing. Selling Usability: User Experience Infiltration Tactics is for usability professionals who are struggling to justify and sell their work to others.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Visit WebWord, LLC @ http://WebWord.com -- -- -- -- -- John S. Rhodes is a usability professional. He is a consultant, teacher, student, and writer. He has broad interests in areas such as psychology, the internet, business analysis, software engineering, design, artificial intelligence, marketing, and strategic management. John runs WebWord.com, one of the best known blogs on usability. About 150,000 pages are served to nearly 28,000 visitors each month. He has provided people with intelligent information about usability, human factors, web site design, information architecture, and content development for more than eight years. John's written well over 120 articles and conducted over 60 interviews. John has done human factors and usability work with, and for, several organizations including IBM, Lockheed Martin, Women.com, Cabelas, US WEST, Binghamton University and Universal Instruments. He has a B.S. in Management Science, an M.A. in Philosophy, and an M.A. in Experimental and Cognitive Psychology from Binghamton University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 246 pages
• Publisher: CreateSpace (February 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1442103736
• ISBN-13: 978-1442103733
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #830,913 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars selling usability: why it failed to convince me, August 2, 2009

By 

Lex23 - See all my reviews

This review is from: Selling Usability: User Experience Infiltration Tactics (Paperback)

Selling usability promises to teach you tactics to infiltrate usability into your organization. By means of 41 short chapters, including an abstract and a wrap-up, it tries to deliver these lessons to you.

Indeed, there are some nice tips and tricks for making people aware of the importance and ROI of usability (but non of these are lessons you can't find in any 'how to boost your career' manual). However, the 41 chapters Rhodes wrote are actually variations on a few lessons that he has to share. Imagine you are a colleague you are trying to convince and look at the issue from his point of view, it's all about the money and people other than you don't care about UX as much as you do are some prime examples which are repeated over and over, but in different wording. As a result, the book failed to hold my attention after a few chapters.

Another thing that I really disliked about the book is Rhodes' writing style. Every few sentences he tries to put in a one-liner or confidence booster. Really, I can't hear the phrases 'let's make some UX magic happen' and 'let's sprinkle some UX magic dust' anymore. I'm a person who is serious in his job, I don't need this kind of encouragement. Finally, the book is full of spelling mistakes and typos. And as the book progresses they increase. Like Rhodes needed to finish the book in a hurry. The least you can do after you have written a book is getting it spell-checked.

In all, the book has a few interesting lessons, but when you read it you have the feeling that some kind of self-proclaimed guru with ADHD is trying to convince you what to do.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome, down to earth and a must for every UX practitioner, March 29, 2009

By 

Peter Van Dijck "Information architectu" (Belgium) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Selling Usability: User Experience Infiltration Tactics (Paperback)

The book is about selling user experience, not from the top down (ie. convincing your CEO), but from the bottom up, which is how 99% of us have to sell it. It's funny, it's brilliant, if I could write like that I'd be writing my next book today. I love it.

If you're doing UX work in a large organization, you should buy this book. And if you're a UX consultant, you should too. It's that simple. The book is worth it's weight in gold: it gives you (as a UX person) insight in how to really get things done in large companies.

The first chapter starts off good (and I'm gonna put a lot of quotes in this review to give you an idea of the writing style and wisdom in the book):

"99% of the people in an organization are not thinking about UX and the other 1 % are thinking about women, fire and dangerous things. Most managers understand UX about as well as they understand the average airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow."

A wakeup call, but true. It's a practical book, can't emphasize this enough:

"This book is full of stealth. We've got guerilla attacks, end runs, and cloaking devices. These tactics are not conventional. I'm asking you to reject the frontal assault. We'll be successful under the radar."

In "2. The First Business of Business is Business", he explains what business is all about.

"How Do You Talk About UX? The advice I am going to give you next is worth the price of the book: Do not talk about user experience for at least a month. Instead, before you say or do anything regarding UX, think about what it means to the bottom line. Modify your language to be more in line with the true intentions of the business."

Chapter 3: User Experience is an Ugly Baby

I didn't know Donald Norman used the term "user experience" in 1998 and 1999.

Again, John puts his finger right on the problem:

"Most folks involved in UX do not have business or management experience. This means that few people can bridge the gap between the two worlds. There isn't a common language available. This leaves UX at a disadvantage."

In chapter 4: Understanding Your Role in the (Dis)Organization, he explains how companies *really* work. Forget about the org chart.

"Managers hate risk; they love people who can reduce it. In business, there's nothing so valuable as a sure thing. Put that idea in your pocket and never let it go."

In the following chapters, John explains how to deal with managers, co-workers, designers, sales, CEOs and executives, teams, stakeholders and consultants. One chapter each. This part of the book is pure gold: for every group, John clearly explains how they think (and this is true in almost all organizations), and even more importantly, how to influence them).

More good quotes:

"A consultant has power nearly equal that of a customer. There isn't quite as much juice flowing, but it can be pretty damn close, especially since your organization is probably paying this person hefty sums of cabbage."

"I like almost all designers and developers. The reason is pretty simple. Unlike so many workers, these men and women get real work done. "

"Sales people talk. They talk to a lot of people and they talk all the time, mostly to product managers, marketing, and of course customers. Although unusually biased, these workers have an exceptional grasp of what your company has to offer and what your customers want and need."

By the time we get to chapter 14, it's back to you. How to use project momentum to your advantage. Here's the first sentence of this chapter: "All projects are headed in some direction. You want to understand the vector of activity and inject UX along the way." Damn good stuff.

Now go buy this book.

I've only read half of the book this far, but I am wildly enthusiastic, so I'm going to go ahead and post this review right now. Buy this book. Order it for everyone in your consulting company. Really. It's almost at the level of "Don't make me think", which I think is the best book about usability ever written. And I only say "almost" coz it lacks the funky illustrations. Go order it! If you're disappointed you can email me personally.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Few greats points, a lot of repetition and not enough examples, July 17, 2009

By 

Ole Gregersen (Copenhagen, Denmark) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Selling Usability: User Experience Infiltration Tactics (Paperback)

This book is both great and not worth the buy. It truly has some great points, they are not new, but they are true and well-written. The point are more or less: Know your recievers language, priorities and culture. Speak their language, use their methods, insert your UX knowledge, skill and results into their work. Get them to speak your cause. And so on.

After reading half the book, I got bored. It seem to repeat the same message again and again, just adjusted to different team members and subjects. I felt like ripping the first quarter of the book of for the bookshelf and trash the rest.

So, there a dilemma about this book. The points are great, but they can't carry the whole book. After while you get inchi fingers because you want to go furtherm, deeper into this. But there are only few examples, merely anecdotes. Its almost fictional, like a good story.

Its also a little narrowminded (for me personally), because it keeps downplaying evangelizing or trying to get others to evangelize - in the sence that "they are bigger, been there longer, have more power or higher priorities". This might be true - especially since the writer is very experience in this field - but I can't help but feeling like its either a very personal style or a little hesitant.

All in all. By the book, if you don't feel like nowing this kind of stuff already. But as a UX professional (like me) you might be dissapointet, because of the lack of more hands-on advice. (Still, the man i right you know...)