Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research, Second Edition

The gap between who designers and developers imagine their users are, and who those users really are can be the biggest problem with product development. Observing the User Experience will help you bridge that gap to understand what your users want and need from your product, and whether they'll be able to use what you've created.

Filled with real-world experience and a wealth of practical information, this book presents a complete toolbox of techniques to help designers and developers see through the eyes of their users. It provides in-depth coverage of 13 user experience research techniques that will provide a basis for developing better products, whether they're Web, software or mobile based. In addition, it's written with an understanding of product development in the real world, taking tight budgets, short schedules, and existing processes into account.

Since the publication of the first edition, the business of user research has exploded with new technologies and new techniques. This second edition takes those changes into account with extensive revisions to existing topics. It also adds entirely new material on observational research, mobile usability, diary studies, remote research, and cross-cultural and multilingual projects.

• Explains how to balance usability with creativity and originality
• A valuable resource for designers, developers, project managers -- anyone whose work affects the end user experience
• Provides a real-world perspective on research. Helps you do user research cheaply and quickly, and present it persuasively
• Gives you the tools and confidence to perform user research on your own design, tuning user experience to the unique needs of your product and its users

About the Authors

Mike Kuniavsky is a user experience designer, researcher, and author. A 20-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.

Andrea Moed believes that research is essential in designing to support human relationships. She has been a design researcher and strategist for over 15 years, observing users of websites, phones and other mobile devices, museums, retail environments, and educational and business software. She is currently the Staff User Researcher at Inflection, a technology company working to democratize access to public records. Andrea has master's degrees from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and the UC Berkeley School of Information and has taught at the Parsons School of Design in New York. Her writing on design and technology has appeared in a variety of publications.

Elizabeth Goodman's writing, design, and research focus on interaction design for mobile and ubiquitous computing. Elizabeth has taught user experience research at the University of California, Berkeley and site-specific art practice at the San Francisco Art Institute. As well, she has worked with exploratory user experience research teams at Intel, Fuji-Xerox, and Yahoo! Elizabeth speaks widely on the design of mobile and pervasive computing systems at conferences, schools, and businesses. She has a master's degree in interaction design from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. Her scholarly research on interaction design practice has been supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship and an Intel Ph.D. Fellowship.