- Hardcover: 448 pages
- Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann; 1 edition (Oct 12 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1558607129
- ISBN-13: 978-1558607125
- Product Dimensions: 24 x 18.7 x 3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 1.1 Kg
- Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #334,774 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
"This book is ideally suited for a problem-based curriculum in which students simultaneously learn good development processes while completing a term project. The book gives excellent guidance, and the case study approach is an excellent organizer and motivator. At last, the proper problem-based textbook. " -- Don Norman, Nielsen Norman Group
"One of the nice things about this book is that it identifies where tradeoffs exist in developing user interfaces. Too many books provide guidelines as if they were absolute; unfortunately, this is not the case. Tradeoffs must be constantly made, and understanding how one usability objective can impact another is critical to good design." -- Jon Meads, Usability Architects
"One of the nice things about this book is that it identifies where tradeoffs exist in developing user interfaces. Too many books provide guidelines as if they were absolute; unfortunately, this is not the case. Tradeoffs must be constantly made, and understanding how one usability objective can impact another is critical to good design." -- Jon Meads, Usability Architects
Product Description
You don't need to be convinced. You know that usability is key to the success of any interactive system-from commercial software to B2B Web sites to handheld devices. But you need skills to make usability part of your product development equation. How will you assess your users' needs and preferences? How will you design effective solutions that are grounded in users' current practices? How will you evaluate and refine these designs to ensure a quality product?
Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction is a radical departure from traditional books that emphasize theory and address experts. This book focuses on the realities of product development, showing how user interaction scenarios can make usability practices an integral part of interactive system development. As you'll learn, usability engineering is not the application of inflexible rules; it's a process of analysis, prototyping, and problem solving in which you evaluate tradeoffs, make reasoned decisions, and maximize the overall value of your product.
* Written by prominent HCI educators who understand how to teach usability practices to students and professional developers.
* Interleaves HCI theory and concepts with a running case study demonstrating their application.
* Gradually elaborates the case study to introduce increasingly sophisticated usability engineering techniques.
* Analyzes usability issues in realistic scenarios that describe existing or envisioned systems from the perspective of one or more users.
* Emphasizes the real world of usability engineering-a world in which tradeoffs must be weighed and difficult decisions made to achieve desired results.
* Includes a companion Web site which provides additional case studies in a multimedia format, along with a Java application for creating and editing scenarios. This site also provides instructors with sample syllabi, lecture slides and notes, in-class exercises, solutions to textbook exercises, additional project ideas, and links to other HCI resources.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
During the 1990s scenario-based software development techniques became increasingly prominent in software engineering and human-computer interaction. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
During the 1990s scenario-based software development techniques became increasingly prominent in software engineering and human-computer interaction. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
Horribly Dry and Boring with Little to Recommend,
By A Customer
This review is from: Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction (Hardcover)
Man, where do I start? I was actually looking forward to a college class on designing easy-to-use computer applications. Boy did I not get what I was looking for, in large part due to this book.First off, this textbook is boring as heck. Almost everything is black and white, and the design scheme of the book alone makes one not want to read it. In fact, this book is a poor example of usability in its own right. So that's the looks. The actual content is not particularly useful either. Instead of giving practical, real-world advice, it spends too much time waxing strong about a stupid model called "scenario-based development," as I remember. This is basically the common-sense and annoying pet theory of the authors. Finally, the examples and interface illustrations in the book seemed so out of date for a book copyrighted in 2002. Just a thought. Overall: Reads like an academic book written for stuffy academics. Little practical information on designing good applications is provided.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
2.5 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews) 11 of 14 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very well organized,
By cubase di pilsen "‹^› ‹( &#... - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction (Hardcover)
This book is a good reference in many points of the usability process - evaluation, design, and testing. The authors organize chapters in a very structured way that the content is very digestible. At 448 pages, the book isn't meant to be read in a single session, but again, it's a great reference.My favorite part about this book is the fact that it actually has a section on user documentation - something that is lacking in many books on the subject of usability, and the achilles heel of many projects. 2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great and applicable for other domains,
By Hussein Ahmed - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction (Hardcover)
A very good book mainly focused on Scenario-Based analysis which you can actually use in every other subject and aspects of your life (even if you are choosing between trips). I bought this book as a text book for an HCI subject in VT and it was interesting to follow.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Myopic, innaccurate,
By Merv Green - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction (Hardcover)
This book delivers little specific usability advice, but as another review said, touts its authors' pet theory they call "scenario based design." Often, it simply misinforms. Take this quote from the pages available on Look Inside:--- "Software engineering is founded on the ideas of structured programming (Mills 1971): Programmers first define the major structures of a software system - the database, the event handler, and the network server..." --- The term "software engineering," according to Wikipedia, appeared in the 1950s, well before Goto Considered Harmful popularized "structured programming." The authors, however, handily ignore this and imply that Mills invented structured programming with databases, event handlers and servers, leading to a new dawn of computer engineering. Nevermind that ARPANET was at that time a toddler and what they call "structured programming" only barely resembles the accepted definition. While these particular errors do not relate directly to the relative merits of the usability advice this book offers, they do illustrate a careless quality in the research. Furthermore, they indicate the authors' apparent unfamiliarity with software development history and practical software construction. |
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