User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach [Paperback]

Karel Vredenburg (Author), Scott Isensee (Author), Carol Righi (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0130912956 | ISBN-13: 978-0130912954 | Publication Date: December 23, 2001

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"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

From the Back Cover

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!

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall (December 23, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0130912956
• ISBN-13: 978-0130912954
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #281,323 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not really helpful, August 31, 2005

By 

H. Leskinen - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach (Paperback)

The authors should have paid more attention how they present this issue. Maybe the book was written in very tight schedule. The book repeated itself many times and was really badly edited. The content itself was ok, however nothing really new and not enough good reasoning. All these same concepts are presented in the other literature of UCD and HCI. I suggest Eric Schaffer's book.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, a practical and usable book about UCD, July 17, 2002

By 

Janice James (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach (Paperback)

As a usability specialist for the past 14 years, I gravitate toward books that I can actually extract from and use their contents, rather than just reading descriptions of a process. The book emphasizes the importance of a multi-disciplinary team and steps us through the different phases of the UCD process. It also includes a great FAQ section. The CD that comes with the book includes movies addressing the various stages of a user-centered design process and many other resources. This is a must-have book for all those involved in developing products and services that people can easily use.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A solid process to develop usable products., June 21, 2002

By 

Rick Poston (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach (Paperback)

I am a certified professional ergonomist(software specialist) with over 25 years experience. I wish this book had been publish 20 years ago - it could have saved many hours of work. In a very practical and clear way, this book presents a blueprint for how to integrate the UCD usability process into a project so that your product matches customer needs. The book gives clear step by step instructions on the methods for understanding your customer's requirements and developing a product that matches those needs. The book presents the process in a simple, thorough, cook-book way. Sample forms and case studies are plentiful. In addition to the process, it also covers practical issues such as how to sell UCD to your organization and the cost benefits of UCD. If you are a beginner you will have no trouble understanding the book. If you are an experienced practitioner you may find the material can save you some work. The sample plans, forms, presentations, and project templates alone are worth the price.