User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach - Softcover

Vredenburg, Karel; Isensee, Scott; Righi, Carol

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0130912956 ISBN 13: 9780130912954

Publisher: Prentice Hall, 2001

Synopsis

User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach will help you optimize your customers' total experience with any technology product or service - from purchase and installation through support, upgrades, and beyond. Karel Vredenburg, Scott Isensee, and Carol Righi, the field's leading experts, present methods, techniques, case studies, and CD-ROM-based tools for introducing, deploying, and optimizing UCD to make products that are simpler, more elegant, more powerful, and more profitable.

About this title

About the Author

THE AUTHORS have used this book's techniques to design everything from mainframe computers to the Olympics Web site.

KAREL VREDENBURG, Architect and Corporate Champion for User-Centered Design at IBM, led the creation of the integrated version of UCD presented in this book.

SCOTT ISENSEE, user interface architect at BMC Software, is a former senior member of IBM's user interface architecture group. He holds 42 U.S. patents, and is co-author of The Art of Rapid Prototyping.

CAROL RIGHI, President of Righi Interface Engineering, Inc., has worked in HCI since 1984 and specializes in user-interface design and design education.

The authors run a popular workshop series titled Practical UCD: How to Introduce, Deploy, and Optimize User-Centered Design.

From the Back Cover

The start-to-finish guide to User-Centered Design!

• Make technology products easy to obtain, learn, and use
• New methods, tools, technologies, and real-world case studies
• A complete lifecycle approach to UCD that delivers breakthrough efficiency
• Evaluating your current products and aligning your entire organization to support UCD
• Improving everything your customers see, hear, and touch
• Applying UCD to software, hardware, Web sites, and services for both external and in-house use
• Optimizing UCD today—and anticipating trends that will impact tomorrow's products

It's this simple: User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach will help you build products that customers will love—and buy!

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface

Do you want to change what people say about your product or system, referring to it as "elegant, simple, and powerful" rather than "ham-fisted, ugly, and unusable"? Or perhaps they're not saying anything at all. Then this book is for you. It provides an integrated approach to User-Centered Design (UCD) with an emphasis on using UCD to make products easy to buy, learn, and use. It focuses on designing a compelling "total customer experience"—everything a customer sees, hears, and touches about a product or system.

The integrated version of User-Centered Design, described in this book, was initially developed at IBM in the early 1990s by Karel Vredenburg. A team of experts at IBM continuously worked with the first author to improve this version of UCD. It is currently in its third major version. Scott Isensee and Carol Righi were instrumental in the evolution of the approach not only while they were at IBM but also after they left the company. Since leaving IBM, Scott has applied UCD effectively to the design of the i-opener information appliance at NetPliance and currently implements UCD at BMC Software. Carol formed her own company, Righi Interface Engineering, Inc. She has led UCD projects both while at IBM and now as a consultant for clients such as Chrysler, MetLife, and the Usability Professionals' Association and has taught User-Centered Design classes to major corporations. We continue to run a highly popular workshop entitled, "How to Introduce, Deploy, and Optimize User-Centered Design in Your Organization."

This book is a distillation of our collective experience and that of our colleagues in introducing UCD to many hundreds of companies and deploying it on a few thousand projects over the past 10 years. We have used the approach to design products ranging from mainframe computers to integrated circuits, notebook computers to Web appliances, database software to speech recognition software, Web site portals to the Web site for the Olympics, and we have used it on consulting projects worldwide for many industries, including healthcare, finance and banking, aerospace, insurance, automotive, and retail.

We sincerely hope that you enjoy reading the book and applying the information contained within it.

Edition details

• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0130912956
• ISBN 13: 9780130912954
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 246