What Is New in This Edition: Ten Years of Progress

A lot has changed in the ten years since the first edition of this book was published. One of the biggest changes is the shift from a focus on “usability” to “user experience.” “Usability” is an attribute of a system or user interface (UI). It refers to the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which users can achieve tasks when using a product. “User experience,” on the other hand, is human-centered and is the co-creation of an interaction between a person or persons and a product. User experience includes “usability” and all aspects a user encounters when dealing with a product or service from the branding to the motion and audio design to customer support. It is about how the product or service makes the user feel. You can see this change reflected in job titles (e.g., from “Usability Engineer” in the 1990s and early 2000s to “User Experience Researcher” today) and professional organizations (e.g., the “Usability Professionals Association” changed their name to “User Experience Professionals Association” in 2012). The result of the change in focus means that a User Experience Researcher (UER or UXR) must conduct research beyond the UI and think about all of the elements influencing a user’s experience. This change is reflected most prominently in our new title: “Understanding Your Users: A Practical Guide to User Research,” but you’ll see smaller reflections of this throughout the book.

A second change in the profession is the popularity of agile development processes and similar lightweight, iterative, project-based approaches. Created in 2001, Agile is a rapid development process used by a cross-functional team that ideally works together closely and meets daily. While agile development does include continuous customer or stakeholder involvement, the competing requirement to iterate quickly in small operable chunks, means it can be difficult to incorporate user research into the process. This makes conducting early user research to understand user requirements critical because there may be less time in later cycles to conduct longer-term research. To address this development, we added content around the importance of and techniques to enhance interactions with stakeholders and product teams.

A third development is the increasing variety of technology and contexts where research is needed. For example, products that were considered science fiction ten years ago such as wearables (e.g., smart watches, Google Glass), self-driving cars, and increasingly complex consumer medical devices (e.g., contact lens that measures blood glucose in tears) are now here or within reach. This means that the research we conduct is less often inside a usability lab and more often in context. It means we must understand not just whether users can find the feature they want and whether it meets a real user need, but also how people around those using the device(s) feel and respond to it. It is this highly complex interplay of technology development at breath-taking speeds and the human response to it that makes conducting valid, reliable, and ethical research much more challenging today. With this in mind, we refreshed the chapter on ethics, updated the example scenarios we use throughout the book and included additional details about conducting user research in the user’s context.

A fourth development is the dramatically increased availability of tools that enable remote user research. These tools range from tools created specifically to make the job of a user researcher easier, to general purpose communication tools like Skype or Google Hangouts that now make conducting interviews across the country as convenient as conducting them in the user researcher’s home city. Throughout the chapters, we introduce these tools, provide links to example tools, and include discussions of the pros and cons of using these types of tools in your research.

Besides updating the book to meet these shifts in practice and the profession of user experience research, we removed two methods that are less frequently used (i.e., Wants and Needs Analysis, Group Task Analysis). We replaced these with other methods that were not included in the first edition, but have since become increasingly used to learn about users (e.g., Social Sentiment Analysis, Experience Sampling Methodology, Diary Studies, crowdsourcing). Another significant change we made, based on feedback primarily from students, was to add a chapter on evaluation methods (i.e., heuristic evaluation, cognitive walkthroughs, usability testing, eye tracking, Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation, desirability testing, remote testing, and live experiments). Students and professors told us they loved the first edition, but for it to be more useful in introductory courses on user research, it should include a chapter on evaluating a product’s usability. We agree and feel this increases the scope of the book from just user requirements methods to cover the entire spectrum of user research. We also added a section to discuss special user types one should consider in their research (e.g., older users, children, physically challenged). Finally, in the spirit of modernization, we have updated all of the methods to reflect the most recent understanding about ways to collect data validly and reliably and refreshed the references accordingly.

To make the book easier to use, we ceased relegating data analysis methods to appendices and instead incorporated one detailed data analysis method per chapter. For user research methods where more than one data analysis method can be used, we outlined those methods briefly and pointed readers to additional details within other chapters. We hope this provides a more pleasant, straightforward, self-contained reading experience. Another way we improved usefulness was by incorporating example data collection instruments, tools, worksheets, and notetaking samples throughout the book. We anticipate these examples and tools will be especially useful to those readers who are new to user experience research and/or are working in contexts where these types of examples are not readily available.

Finally, we wanted to make sure the book was fun and immediately practical. Abi Jones’ cartoons provide delightful pictures when words wouldn’t do and add levity. With the help of incredibly talented case study authors, we have included all new case studies that provide practical examples of these methods in action in a variety of contexts from software development to banking to medical devices.

How to Use This Book

This book is designed to be a comprehensive, easy-to-read, “how-to” guide on user research methods. It teaches many distinct user research methods and also covers pre- and post-method considerations, such as recruiting, facilitating activities or moderating, negotiating with product development teams/customers, and getting your results incorporated into the product. To help illustrate the material and methods presented in this book, we refer to a fictitious mobile travel app called “TravelMyWay.com” throughout the book.

This book has five main parts:

Targeted Readers

This book has something to offer whether you are new to user experience or a seasoned professional.