| A Project Guide To UX Design, 3rd Ed (New Riders) |
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Author: Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler This book says it is aimed at user experience designers in the field. I'd say it is really aimed at people working in teams of web designers. The book opens with a chapter titled 'the Tao of UXD', which tells you a lot about the approach taken by the authors to how to go about designing user interfaces and the user experience. This opening chapter asks the question, 'what is user experience design?', and goes on to define it as being the creation and synchronization of the elements that affect users' experience of an organization's products and services, using data-informed insights on user behavior and perception. 
Chapter 2 goes into more practical details of the project ecosystem - identify the type of product, consider different devices, choose your hats (information architect, interaction designer and user researcher are the main suggestions). The chapter concludes with a section on understanding the company culture.
Chapter 3 considers the roles of 'ops' in a design team, with sections on design operations, research operations and content operations. This is followed by a chapter on defining the project objectives and approach, with sections on waterfall and agile methodologies. A longer chapter on Discovery comes next. This covers stages including the pre-planning, kickoff workshop, detailed discovery planning and prototyping. Chapter 6 describes workshops and collaboration activities, with discussions on how to find out the priorities in terms of the features, goals and needs of the client. This is followed by chapters on user research and personas, and how to work out what the different user groups are and how to prioritize their different needs. Mapping methods are next on the agenda. The authors explain this in terms of drawing the pages, decision points, connectors, and conditions that set out how the user interacts with the app. There's a section on common mistakes that sounds like it would be getting into technical details, but in fact describes mistakes such as not aligning the objects on the page, or drawing the connections sloppily rather than neatly. More useful later sections define process and journey maps. The authors then move on to product definitions and design foundations, with discussions of how to structure ideas, prioritization, and principles of design including interaction and the psychology of design in terms of how an attractive design can persuade people to explore your product. A chapter on content strategy looks at questions about when it's needed, who works the strategy out, and how long it lasts. The next chapter is titled Wireframes and prototypes, which sounds rather real compared to most topics so far; in this context, wireframes are screens that show the elements of the final product without the logic behind them necessary to make them work. This chapter includes a fairly extensive example of setting up and testing a wireframe for an imaginary client. The final two chapters of the book look at design testing, and the differences between the product launch and the product release. What you get out of this book will depend a lot on where you're starting from. If you're a developer used to writing code, it would be an interesting read to show what's going on at the arty end of the web design sector. If you work in the design end of web apps, it's actually a good read. The titles of some chapters and sections might sound rather high-faluting, but the actual content makes sensible points and recommendations. If, as someone who's expected to find out from clients what they want, you follow the suggestions in the book, you'll end up asking the right questions to find out what your client actually wants, which is never very easy.
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| Last Updated ( Tuesday, 03 September 2024 ) |
