The UX Book

The discipline of user experience (UX) design has matured into a confident practice and this edition reflects, and in some areas accelerates, that evolution. Technically this is the second edition of The UX Book, but so much of it is new, it is more like a sequel.

One of the major positive trends in UX is the continued emphasis on design—a kind of design that highlights the designer’s creative skills and insights and embodies a synthesis of technology with usability, usefulness, aesthetics, and meaningfulness to the user. In this edition a new conceptual top-down design framework is introduced to help readers with this evolution.

This entire edition is oriented toward an agile UX lifecycle process, explained in the funnel model of agile UX, as a better match to the now de facto standard agile approach to software engineering. To reflect these trends, even the subtitle of the book is changed to “Agile UX design for a quality user experience”.

Designed as a how-to-do-it handbook and field guide for UX professionals and a textbook for aspiring students, the book is accompanied by in-class exercises and team projects.

The approach is practical rather than formal or theoretical. The primary goal is still to imbue an understanding of what a good user experience is and how to achieve it. To better serve this, processes, methods, and techniques are introduced early to establish process-related concepts as context for discussion in later chapters. 

• A comprehensive textbook for UX/HCI/Interaction Design students readymade for the classroom, complete with instructors’ manual, dedicated web site, sample syllabus, examples, exercises, and lecture slides
• Features HCI theory, process, practice, and a host of real world stories and contributions from industry luminaries to prepare students for working in the field
• 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)

Graduate and undergraduate students in user experience and UX design courses, UX practitioners, software engineers, programmers, and software testers

PART 1. INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1. What is UX and UX design?
Chapter 2. The Wheel: UX processes, lifecycles, methods, and technique
Chapter 3. Scope, rigor, complexity, and project perspectives
Chapter 4. Agile lifecycle processes and the Funnel Model of Agile UX
Chapter 5. Prelude to the process chapters
Chapter 6. Background: Introduction

PART 2. UNDERSTAND NEEDS
Chapter 7. Usage research data elicitation
Chapter 8. Usage research data analysis
Chapter 9. Usage research data modeling
Chapter 10. UX design requirements: User stories and requirements
Chapter 11. Background: Understand Needs

PART 3. DESIGN SOLUTIONS
Chapter 12. The nature of UX design
Chapter 13. Bottom-up vs. top-down design
Chapter 14. Generative design: Ideation, sketching, and critiquing
Chapter 15. Mental models and conceptual design
Chapter 16. Designing the ecology and a pervasive information architecture
Chapter 17. Designing the interaction
Chapter 18. Designing for emotional impact
Chapter 19. Background: Design

PART 4. PROTOTYPE CANDIDATES
Chapter 20. Prototyping

PART 5. EVALUATE UX
Chapter 21. UX evaluation methods and techniques
Chapter 22. UX evaluation: UX goals, metrics, and targets
Chapter 23. Preparation for empirical UX evaluation
Chapter 24. Empirical data collection methods and techniques
Chapter 25. Analytical data collection methods and techniques
Chapter 26. UX Evaluation: Data analysis
Chapter 27. UX evaluation: Reporting results
Chapter 28. Background: UX evaluation

PART 6. AGILE UX AND CONNECTIONS TO AGILE SE
Chapter 29. Connecting agile UX with agile software development
Chapter 30. Background: Agile connections

PART 7. AFFORDANCES AND DESIGN GUIDELINES
Chapter 31. Affordances in UX design
Chapter 32. The interaction cycle
Chapter 33. UX design guidelines
Chapter 34. Background: Affordances and UX design principles