User Experience Re-Mastered

Book excerpt: User Experience Re-Mastered: Your Guide to Getting the Right Design provides an understanding of key design and development processes aimed at enhancing the user experience of websites and web applications. The book is organized into four parts. Part 1 deals with the concept of usability, covering user needs analysis and card sorting—a tool for shaping information architecture in websites and software applications. Part 2 focuses on idea generation processes, including brainstorming; sketching; persona development; and the use of prototypes to validate and extract assumptions and requirements that exist among the product team. Part 3 presents core design principles and guidelines for website creation, along with tips and examples on how to apply these principles and guidelines. Part 4 on evaluation and analysis discusses the roles, procedures, and documents needed for an evaluation session; guidelines for planning and conducting a usability test; the analysis and interpretation of data from evaluation sessions; and user interface inspection using heuristic evaluation and other inspection methods. - A guided, hands-on tour through the process of creating the ultimate user experience – from testing, to prototyping, to design, to evaluation - Provides tried and tested material from best sellers in Morgan Kaufmann's Series in Interactive Technologies, including leaders in the field such as Bill Buxton and Jakob Nielsen - Features never before seen material from Chauncey Wilson's forthcoming, and highly anticipated Handbook for User Centered Design