Observing the User Experience

Elizabeth Goodman has taught user experience research and tangible interaction design at the University of California, Berkeley and site-specific art practice at the San Francisco Art Institute. She has also worked with exploratory research and design teams at Intel, Fuji-Xerox, and Yahoo and speaks widely on the design of mobile and pervasive computing systems at conferences, schools, and businesses. She received her PhD from the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley in fall 2013. During graduate school, her scholarly research on interaction design practice was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship and an Intel PhD FellowshipMike Kuniavsky is a user experience designer, researcher and author. A twenty-year veteran of digital product development, Mike is a consultant and the co-founder of several user experience centered companies: ThingM manufactures products for ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things; Adaptive Path is a well-known design consultancy. He is also the founder and organizer of Sketching in Hardware, an annual summit on the future of tools for digital product user experience design for leading technology developers, designers and educators. Mike frequently writes and speaks on digital product and service design, and works with product development groups in both large companies and startups. His most recent book is Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design.

Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research aims to bridge the gap between what digital companies think they know about their users and the actual user experience. Individuals engaged in digital product and service development often fail to conduct user research. The book presents concepts and techniques to provide an understanding of how people experience products and services. The techniques are drawn from the worlds of human-computer interaction, marketing, and social sciences.

The book is organized into three parts. Part I discusses the benefits of end-user research and the ways it fits into the development of useful, desirable, and successful products. Part II presents techniques for understanding people's needs, desires, and abilities. Part III explains the communication and application of research results. It suggests ways to sell companies and explains how user-centered design can make companies more efficient and profitable. This book is meant for people involved with their products' user experience, including program managers, designers, marketing managers, information architects, programmers, consultants, and investors.

Part I: Why Research is Good and How It Fits Into Product Development
1. Typhoon: A Fable
2. Do a Usability Test Now!
3. Balancing Needs Through Iterative Development
4. The User Experience

Part II: User Experience Research Techniques
5. The Research Plan
6. Universal tools: Recruiting and Interviewing
7. User Profiles
8. Contextual Inquiry, Task Analysis, Card Sorting
9. Focus Groups
10. Usability Tests
11. Surveys
12. Ongoing Relationship
13. Log Files and Customer Support
14. Competitive Research
15. Others' Hard Work: Published Information and Consultants
16. Emerging Techniques

Part III: Communicating Results
17. Reports and Presentations
18. Creating a User-Centered Corporate Culture

Appendices
A. The Budget Research Lab
B. Common Survey Questions
C. Observer Instructions