Text for graduate and senior undergraduate courses on usability engineering and designing for the user experience
This book is a perfect fit to a fast-paced semester course on engineering for usability and the user experience at the graduate level and can be used selectively for a senior-level undergraduate course on the same topic. We address this most important constituency with a comprehensive treatment of product and process issues involved in developing interaction designs for systems in almost any kind of development environment. Presentation of this material in the book is bolstered with examples of major parts of the process, exercises for the students to explore the material on a small scale, and project assignments (in the instructor’s guide) for application to projects for real-world clients and customers. The goal for this audience is to send students out into the usability and user experience world as well-trained and confident practitioners.
Text for industry short courses on usability engineering and designing for the user experience
Most of the same features that make this an ideal textbook for college and university courses also qualifies it as the go-to text for short courses on the same topics. Much of the practical and applied perspective of the book has been achieved through iterative refinement of the material we have presented in a large number of short courses in industry, business, and government.
Self-learning guide and reference book for practitioners in the field
This important market segment includes new usability practitioners, experienced practitioners, project managers, usability and user experience consultants, and even marketing people who wish to emphasize usability or user experience of their products.
The practitioner audience includes people completely new to usability and user experience but who have been assigned to help develop or to oversee usability and interaction design. It also includes practitioners who have been out there practicing what they know about it but who seek additional background and understanding about what to do and how to do it right.
This book is also intended for software engineers, programmers, software testers, and other roles in a traditional software development team who may not necessarily undertake interaction design work, but who work in close contact and collaboration with interaction designers and want to learn about the usability side of project work. Our strong process approach and use of parallels with the software engineering model will make our presentation appreciated by software engineering people. This book will help them gain a broad understanding of the practice, philosophy, and constraints inherent in interaction design, while fostering an empathy and understanding of this counterpart discipline.
For practitioners, the book not only functions as a textbook for learning, but a valuable and comprehensive handbook or field guide to application of the methods and principles. As a value-added feature to this latter end, we intend to include process and guidelines summaries that can be posted for direct guidance during project work.