The UX Book

Agile UX Design for a Quality User Experience

About The UX Book

A comprehensive textbook and practitioner’s field guide to understanding, assimilating, applying, and practicing the user experience design lifecycle.

The only HCI textbook to cover agile methodology, design approaches, and a full, modern suite of classroom material (stemming from tried and tested classroom use by the authors).

Winner of the Most Promising New Textbook Award in 2013. Awarded to 1st edition textbooks and learning materials in recognition for excellence in pedagogy, content, scholarship, writing, and design.

Features

Addressing a
long-standing gap

Over the years, in our conversations with colleagues in different colleges and universities, we found a need for a good process and product book that is easy and straightforward to adopt by instructors. We set out to address this gap with this book. No other HCI product and process book has the ready-to-use supplementary materials that offer such a low barrier for new instructors to pick up this material and teach a UE/UX course like a pro.

Comprehensive coverage

There are books on portions of what we cover, books on only the iterative lifecycle, contextual research early in the lifecycle, usability and user experience testing late in the lifecycle, creative design and innovation, pragmatics of usability engineering in the real world, and so on. However they do not cover these topics and all the others as an integrative whole as we do in this book.

Our treatment of contextual inquiry and contextual analysis in the tradition of Beyer & Holtzblatt, (Contextual Design: A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs, 1st ed., 1997, Morgan Kaufmann), adapted to the context of a full lifecycle process, is exclusive to this book.

Audiences

Text for graduate and senior undergraduate courses on usability engineering and designing for the user experience

Text for industry short courses on usability engineering and designing for the user experience

Self-learning guide and reference book for practitioners in the field

Supplementary materials

Comprehensive set of supplementary materials and Instructor’s Guide to mount a college-level (or other) course on user experience design, complete enough to support even an instructor who is new to this topic.

Authors

Pardha Pyla

Pardha Pyla

Pardha S. Pyla is an award-winning designer and strategist with deep expertise in envisioning and delivering industry-leading products. He is a seasoned leader with a record of establishing exemplary product and user experience practices.

He is a pioneering researcher in the area of coordinating software engineering and UX lifecycle processes and the author of several peer-reviewed research publications in human-computer interaction and software engineering.

He has received numerous awards in recognition of his work in design, research, teaching, leadership, and service.

Rex Hartson

Rex Hartson

Rex Hartson is a pioneer researcher, teacher, practitioner, and consultant in HCI and UX. He is the founding faculty member of HCI (in 1979) in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. With Deborah Hix, he coauthored one of the first books to emphasize the usability engineering process: Developing User Interfaces: Ensuring Usability Through Product & Process.

Hartson has been principal investigator (PI) or co-PI at Virginia Tech on a large number of research grants and has published many journal articles, conference papers, and book chapters. He has presented many tutorials, invited lectures, workshops, seminars, and international talks. He was editor or coeditor for Advances in Human–Computer Interaction, Volumes 1–4, Ablex Publishing Co., Norwood, New Jersey.

His HCI practice is grounded in over 30 years of consulting and UX Design training for dozens of clients in business, industry, government, and the military.

Contact Us

Contact the authors with questions, comments, or feedback. We will get back to you as soon as we can.
– Rex & Pardha