Why This Book?

Many people in digital product and service development never do user research. We often hear people say things like: “Putting a product in front of consumers will be expensive—and besides, we need to ship next month!” Or: “Usability research limits design creativity.” And: “It’s not even necessary because the developers are themselves part of the community of users and thus instinctively empathetic to what those other users find useful or usable.” Finally: “And besides, [insert the name of famous company here] doesn’t do it!”

You, clearly, think otherwise. You think it’s important to know who is using the products you’re making. And, you know, you’re right. Finding out who your customers are, what they want, and what they need is the start of figuring out how to give it to them. Your customers are not you. They don’t look like you, they don’t think like you, they don’t do the things that you do, they don’t share your expectations, assumptions, and aspirations. If they did, they wouldn’t be your customers; they’d be your competitors.

This book is designed to help you bridge the gap between what you think you know about your users and who they really are. It’s not an academic treatise. It’s a toolbox of concepts to understand how people experience products and services. The techniques—taken from the worlds of human-computer interaction, marketing, and many of the social sciences—help you know who your users are, to walk in their shoes for a bit.

In addition, the book is about the business of creating usable products. It acknowledges that product development exists within the complexities of a business venture, where the push and pull of real-world constraints do not always allow for an ideal solution. User research is a dirty business, full of complexities, uncertainties, and politics. This book will, if it serves its purpose, help you tame some of that chaos. It will help you gain some clarity and insight into how to make the world a little better by making products and services more thoughtfully.

Who Are You?

This book was written for people who are responsible, in some way, for their products’ user experience. In today’s digital product and service development world, this could be any number of people in the trenches. In fact, the responsibility may shift from person to person as a project progresses. Basically, if you’ve ever found yourself in a position where you are answering for how the end users are going to see the thing you’re making, or how they’re going to interact with it—or even what they’re supposed to do with it—this book is for you.

This means that you could be:

Regardless of your title, you’re someone who wants to know how the people who use the product you’re making perceive it, what they expect from it, what they need from it, and whether they can use what you’ve made for them.

What’s in This Book?

This book is divided into three major sections. The first section (Chapters 1 through 4) describes why end user research is good, how business tensions tug at the user experience, and presents a philosophy for creating useful, desirable, usable, and successful products.

It also contains a short chapter on a technique that will teach you in 15 minutes everything you need to know to start doing usability research tomorrow. Really.

The second section (Chapters 5 through 16) is a cookbook with a dozen techniques for understanding people’s needs, desires, and abilities. We have thoroughly updated this section for the second edition, adding new chapters and revising existing ones to reflect current best practices in 2012. Some of the chapters are completely self-contained, such as the chapters on surveys and usability tests. Others describe supplementary activities, such as collage and map making, to use in conjunction with other techniques. We don’t expect you to read these chapters in one sitting, in order. Far from it! We assume that you will pick up the book when you need it, reading chapters to answer specific questions.

The third section (Chapters 17 through 19) describes how to take your results and use them to change how your company works. It gives you ideas about how to sell your company and how user-centered design can make your company run better and more profitably.

Best practices in research change quickly, as do preferred tools. We have moved much of the reference material in the previous edition to the book’s website. Visit www.mkp.com/observing-the-user-experience for the most up-to-date information on tools and tips, as well as template consent forms, checklists, reports, and other documents.

What’s Not in This Book?

This book is, first and foremost, about defining problems. All the techniques are geared toward getting a better understanding of people and their problems. It’s not about how to solve those problems. Sure, sometimes a good problem definition makes the solution obvious, but that’s not the primary goal of this text.

We strongly believe that there are no hard and fast rules about what is right and what is wrong when designing experiences. Every product exists within a different context that defines what is “right” for it. A toy for preschoolers has a different set of constraints than a stock portfolio management application. Attempting to apply the same rules to both of them is absurd. That is why there are no guides for how to solve the problems that these techniques help you to define. There are no “top-10” lists, there are no “laws,” and there are no universally reliable heuristics. Many excellent books have good ideas about how to solve interaction problems and astute compilations of solutions that are right much of the time, but this book isn’t one of them.

Acknowledgments

We’d like to thank the companies who provided material, some previously unpublished, for case studies: Adaptive Path, Food on the Table, Get Satisfaction, Gotomedia, Lextant, MENA Design Research, PayPal, Portigal Consulting, User Insight, and Users Know. We would especially like to thank our reviewers: Todd Harple, Cyd Harrell, Tikva Morowati, and Wendy Owen. We’d also like to thank the people who have generously given us advice and help, including Elizabeth Churchill and Steve Portigal.

And, of course, our families, who put up with us throughout the very long writing and revision process.