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Measuring the user experience (2nd ed.) : collecting, analyzing, and presenting usability metrics
Tullis T., Albert W., Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 2013. 320 pp. Type: Book (978-0-124157-81-1)
Date Reviewed: Jan 9 2014

User friendliness is a much desired attribute for devices, processes, and websites. However, it is often taken for granted. At the 2000 Society for Design and Process Science conference, Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon told a story about his experience with the user interface in his new car to illustrate why we need to improve man-machine interfaces in the coming years. Despite several degrees in various subjects, he eventually had to take his new car to a mechanic because he could not turn off a warning signal. Since 2000, we have seen dramatic changes in gadgets and websites, driven in part by better information about how people interact with these new devices and systems. The need for improvements has only increased. This book discusses various efforts to identify, collect, analyze, improve, and present metrics that can be used to measure usability.

The book I reviewed is a soft cover produced with high-quality glossy paper. It is well made. It is also fun to read. I recommend it to managers interested in or in charge of user experience design for their products. It is not intended to be a textbook, and the authors did not include guidelines for teaching the material. Ironically, I had one unfortunate user experience while reading this book. The preface states that the book is organized in three sections. When I flipped through the pages, I could find no distinct separators to indicate these sections. This took a bit away from the perfect user experience I expected from a book on the subject of user experience.

However, the book is useful as is, and the publisher supports it with a website (http://www.measuringux.com/). The table of contents and many other related documents are available there. Because the authors also provide consultations on the topics addressed in the book, the website has an advertisement flavor.

Academically speaking, the book fails to cover related perspectives, and readers might wish to look for other resources that might highlight other approaches. I have used two that I found quite useful: a doctoral dissertation by Philippe Georges Zimmermann [1] and a seminal paper written by Google employees [2], based on several years of experimentation.

In conclusion, I found this book academically lacking, but useful to end users as a starting point to learn about usability metrics. The fact that it is in its second edition suggests that there must be many other positive aspects that I did not discover during my review process.

Reviewer:  M. M. Tanik Review #: CR141875 (1403-0184)
1) Zimmermann, P. G. Beyond usability: measuring aspects of user experience. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland, 2008, http://e-collection.library.ethz.ch/eserv/eth:41599/eth-41599-02.pdf.
2) Rodden, K.; Hutchinson, H.; Fu, X. Measuring the user experience on a large scale: user-centered metrics for web applications. In Proc. of CHI 2010. ACM, 2010, 2395–2398.
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Evaluation/ Methodology (H.5.2 ... )
 
 
Methodologies And Techniques (H.5.5 ... )
 
 
User-Centered Design (H.5.2 ... )
 
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