Book Review: Observing the User Experience
By Christine Wiegand, SAP User Experience, SAP AG – October 10, 2003
This review takes a personal look at Mike Kuniavsky's book Observing the User Experience.
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Mike Kuniavsky Usability: Methods
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Mike
Kuniavsky is a founding partner of
Review
"Like a new organism evolving on an island, an idea isolated in a company is exposed only to certain environmental conditions. It only has to face a certain number of predators, deal with a certain kind of climate, adapt to certain kinds of diseases. The only way to know whether an idea will survive outside its sheltered world is to expose it to the environment in which it will ultimately have to live."
Using this analogy from biology, Mike Kuniavsky addresses people who are responsible
how users experience products (interface designers, programmers, information
architects, program managers, and so on). He wants to convince them of how important
it is to understand how users are going to experience the environment they are
creating for them. According to Kuniavsky, his "book is designed to help
readers bridge the gap between what they think they know about their users and
who they really are."
In his book, Kuniavsky offers over a dozen user research techniques taken from the worlds of human-computer interaction, marketing, and many of the social sciences. These techniques help them to understand who the users are and to use this knowledge to create great Websites and applications. Lynda Weinman, in her foreword to the book, puts it even more enthusiastically by claiming that this book presents "tons of real-world experience testing and researching the usability of Websites."
Overview
The book is divided into three major sections:
- Part I: Why Research Is Good and How It Fits into Product Development
- Part II: User Experience Research Techniques
- Part III: Communicating Results
- Appendices: Extra information some readers may find useful: The Budget Research Lab; Common Survey Questions; Observer Instructions
Part II comprises the main part of the book and serves as a reference for user experience techniques.
To get his readers into the right mood, Kuniavsky starts his book with a fable about a fictitious company that, in the end, had to close down because it had developed a product without thinking about the users, and thus it was incomprehensible.
Kuniavsky invites the readers to "do a usability test now!" and teaches them in 15 minutes how to conduct a basic usability test, called the "friends and family usability test" (provided you already have a working product or a semifunctional prototype). While this is a "quick-and-dirty" procedure, it is better than no tests and comprises many ingredients of the techniques described later in the book.
Further on in part I, he describes the factors that make for a good user experience – functionality, efficiency, and desirability – as well as the success factors for the company (profit, promotion) and for advertisers (traffic, awareness). Kuniavsky promotes iterative development because it is best suited to incorporating users' needs into a product.
Figure 1: Iterative development: the final product is at the center, and the development orbits it, adjusting as it goes along (from Observing the User Experience)
At the end of the first section, Kuniavsky defines what user experience means, explains how to create a satisfying user experience, and offers useful tools and techniques. These are classified into three dimensions: information architecture, interaction design, and identity design:
- Information architecture: profile, survey, contextual inquiry and task analysis, card sorting, diary analysis
- Interaction design: task analysis, focus groups, task-based usability testing, log analysis
- Identity design: focus groups, surveys, competitive analysis
Figure 2: A sample research program based on the iterative development spiral (from Observing the User Experience)
Part II of the book provides detailed descriptions of common user research methods (often following the sequence "how to do it," "how to analyze the results," and "example"):
- The research plan: goals, schedules, budget, example plan for company X, maintenance
- Recruiting and interviewing
- Contextual inquiry, task analysis, card sorting
- Focus groups
- Usability tests
- Surveys
- Ongoing relationship: diaries, advisory boards, beta testing, telescoping
- Log files and customer support
- Published information and consultants
- Emerging techniques
The third and final part, "Communicating Results," is about reporting and presenting the results of your research successfully and creating a user-centered corporate culture. For the latter, Kuniavsky promotes a more conservative approach: he suggests not being stubborn and instead changing mind-sets with small successful projects.
I personally like the conversational style that Kuniavsky uses throughout the book and I could sense that the descriptions of the techniques are backed up by the real-world experiences of the author. He offers a lot of useful tips and tricks from his yearlong experiences with design projects. He also provides detailed instructions that will help readers to get started with each technique as well as to analyze their results effectively. Throughout the book, there are helpful and sometimes entertaining notes and warnings in the margins where Kuniavsky refers other user interface and design professionals, books, Websites, and tools.
Kuniavsky's book is long at over 500 pages. For interested readers who are pressed for time, I suggest that they go through parts I and III of the book first and consult the techniques in Part II as needed. Personally, I would have liked an overview of all the techniques described in the book, incorporated into the "in-depth technique part," as well as information on how they are related and how they are embedded in the development process. Readers who are interested in such an overview should visit the Usability Net Website.
I recommend this book as a valuable resource for user research techniques as well as for "war stories" based on others' experiences. After reading this book, you will be optimally prepared for doing user research.
References
Mike Kuniavsky, Crafting a User Research Plan, May 14, 2003, www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000107.php
Mike Kuniavsky, Crafting a User Research Plan, Part II, July 3, 2003, www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000240.php
Usability Net Website: Methods table (www.usabilitynet.org/tools/methods.htm)
