Preface to the Second Edition

Welcome to the second edition of Quantifying the User Experience! In this edition we’ve maintained our focus on providing practical, up-to-date, and pragmatic information on how to measure and analyze user research data. The main changes in this edition are as follows:

One of our primary goals in writing this book has been to make practical assessment of the user experience accessible to a broad range of practitioners and researchers. We start with an understanding of the kinds of data that user researchers typically encounter, and then provide analytical methods appropriate for those data, including tests of significance, confidence intervals, and sample size estimation. Some of the methods are conventional, such as the t-test, whereas other methods are the ones we wished had been taught in our intro to stats classes, but weren’t (such as the adjusted-Wald binomial confidence interval).

Where we can, we provide recommendations and rationales for which method to use in which context. When we can’t make a recommendation, we strive to provide the information needed to make and defend informed decisions. All of this is to support the creation of better products and services, which benefits the people who use them and the enterprises that provide them.