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Book Review: Observing the User Experience

Book | Author | Review

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.

Book

Cover of Observing the User Experience     

Mike Kuniavsky
Observing the User Experience:
A Practitioner's Guide to User Research
 Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2003
ISBN: 1558609237

Usability: Methods

 

 

Author

Photo of Mike KuniavskyMike Kuniavsky is a founding partner of Adaptive Path, a user experience consulting company in San Francisco (update: Kuniavsky is no longer at Adaptive Path). He has been developing commercial Websites since 1994, and is the interaction designer of an award-winning search engine, HotBot. His design work and writing have appeared in many publications, including WebMonkey, ID Magazine, Wired, Inc., The Wall Street Journal, and the LA Times.

 

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 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.

Iterative development

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:

A sample research program

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 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)

 

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