Advice from the experts on how to justify time and money spent on usability!

Today's increasingly competitive and fiscally constrained business environment is fostering the need to cut costs and justify expenditures. Usability engineering is not universally accepted, nor is it yet an integrated aspect of software engineering, and would-be usability champions are hard pressed to win the funding necessary to introduce and promote usability engineering techniques.

You just know that an improvement of the user interface will reap rewards, but how do you justify the expense and the labor and the time—guarantee a robust ROI!—ahead of time? How do you decide how much of an investment should be funded? And what is the best way to sell usability to others? In this completely revised and new edition of Cost-Justifying Usability, Randolph G. Bias (University of Texas at Austin, with 25 years' experience as a usability practitioner and manager) and Deborah J. Mayhew (internationally recognized usability consultant and author of two other seminal books including The Usability Engineering Lifecycle) tackle these and many other problems. It has been updated to cover cost-justifying usability for Web sites and intranets, for the complex applications we have today, and for a host of products—offering techniques, examples, and cases that are unavailable elsewhere. No matter what type of product you build, whether or not you are a cost-benefit expert or a born salesperson, this book has the tools that will enable you to cost-justify the appropriate usability investment. - Includes contributions by a host of experts involved in this work, including Aaron Marcus, Janice Rohn, Chauncey Wilson, Nigel Bevan, Dennis Wixon, Clare-Marie Karat, Susan Dray, Charles Mauro, and many others - Includes actionable ideas for every phase of the software development process - Includes case studies from inside a variety of companies - Includes ideas from "the other side of the table," software executives who hold the purse strings, who offer thoughts on which proposals for usability support they've funded, and which ones they've declined

Usability engineering is about designing products that are easy to use. This text provides an introduction to human computer interaction principles, and how to apply them in ways that make software and hardware more effective and easier to use.

Based on data collected from research conducted at UIE (User Interface Engineering), this book describes how well or poorly some information-rich Web sites performed when real users attempted to find specific answers.

Quantifying the User Experience: Practical Statistics for User Research, Second Edition, provides practitioners and researchers with the information they need to confidently quantify, qualify, and justify their data. The book presents a practical guide on how to use statistics to solve common quantitative problems that arise in user research. It addresses questions users face every day, including, Is the current product more usable than our competition? Can we be sure at least 70% of users can complete the task on their first attempt? How long will it take users to purchase products on the website? This book provides a foundation for statistical theories and the best practices needed to apply them. The authors draw on decades of statistical literature from human factors, industrial engineering, and psychology, as well as their own published research, providing both concrete solutions (Excel formulas and links to their own web-calculators), along with an engaging discussion on the statistical reasons why tests work and how to effectively communicate results. Throughout this new edition, users will find updates on standardized usability questionnaires, a new chapter on general linear modeling (correlation, regression, and analysis of variance), with updated examples and case studies throughout. - Completely updated to provide practical guidance on solving usability testing problems with statistics for any project, including those using Six Sigma practices - Includes new and revised information on standardized usability questionnaires - Includes a completely new chapter introducing correlation, regression, and analysis of variance - Shows practitioners which test to use, why they work, and best practices for application, along with easy-to-use Excel formulas and web-calculators for analyzing data - Recommends ways for researchers and practitioners to communicate results to stakeholders in plain English

Today, more and more Web sites are providing content in multiple languages for targeted countries, and more and more products are being designed for cultural differences in mind. However, the concept of cross-cultural design has not yet become a strong force in the practitioners' and educators' agenda. This book looks at techniques, software, tools

Measuring the User Experience was the first book that focused on how to quantify the user experience. Now in the second edition, the authors include new material on how recent technologies have made it easier and more effective to collect a broader range of data about the user experience. As more UX and web professionals need to justify their design decisions with solid, reliable data, Measuring the User Experience provides the quantitative analysis training that these professionals need. The second edition presents new metrics such as emotional engagement, personas, keystroke analysis, and net promoter score. It also examines how new technologies coming from neuro-marketing and online market research can refine user experience measurement, helping usability and user experience practitioners make business cases to stakeholders. The book also contains new research and updated examples, including tips on writing online survey questions, six new case studies, and examples using the most recent version of Excel. - Learn which metrics to select for every case, including behavioral, physiological, emotional, aesthetic, gestural, verbal, and physical, as well as more specialized metrics such as eye-tracking and clickstream data - Find a vendor-neutral examination of how to measure the user experience with web sites, digital products, and virtually any other type of product or system - Discover in-depth global case studies showing how organizations have successfully used metrics and the information they revealed - Companion site, www.measuringux.com, includes articles, tools, spreadsheets, presentations, and other resources to help you effectively measure the user experience

This completely revised edition, of the Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction, of which 80% of the content is new, reflects the developments in the field since the publication of the first edition in 1988. The handbook is concerned with principles for design of the Human-Computer Interface, and has both academic and practical purposes. It is intended to summarize the research and provide recommendations for how the information can be used by designers of computer systems. The volume may also be used as a reference for teaching and research. Professionals who are involved in design of HCI will find this volume indispensable, including: computer scientists, cognitive scientists, experimental psychologists, human factors professionals, interface designers, systems engineers, managers and executives working with systems development. Much of the information in the handbook may also be generalized to apply to areas outside the traditional field of HCI.

In a complex world, products that are easy to use win favor with consumers. This is the first book on the topic of simplicity aimed specifically at interaction designers. It shows how to drill down and simplify user experiences when designing digital tools and applications. It begins by explaining why simplicity is attractive, explores the laws of simplicity, and presents proven strategies for achieving simplicity. Remove, hide, organize and displace become guidelines for designers, who learn simplicity by seeing before and after examples and case studies where the results speak for themselves.