Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Practicle tips
Review: This book was the best out of several others that I have read realted to usability engineering or UCD. It had several practical examples and stories attached to each topic. Its excellent for starter as well as proffesionals who are working at companies and have to justify several things. Several formates for reports and other resources are available for conducting a good Users and Task Analysis. More so its really easy and interesting to read with all the stories and the diagrams.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Starting Point
Review: This is the first book I've read on this subject, and it was a great starting point for me. I'm responsible for implementing a system that, in its current state, is not "user-friendly" enough. This was the book I was looking for to help me express the criticality of the user's perspective to the designers as we embark on the redesign. A starting point for our dialog will be the classification of users into "novices, advanced beginners, competent performers, and experts," and their corresponding characteristics. The example showing that approximately 80% of users do not move beyond the "advanced beginner" stage on a tool that they use relatively infrequently. This matches our experiences. For our product to be successful, we need to focus on these users, who will be the majority of our population. I also take to heart the reactions that can emerge from the shock of seeing real users working with the prototype or product for the first time: defensiveness, despair, rush to redesign, and the thought that it can all be solved by training or documentation. Been there, felt that. Through reading this book, I have a new appreciation for the complexity of the task ahead of us, and the tremendous amount of time and attention it is going to take to get it right. Fortunately, we have a user community that is currently very eager to help us get it right -- this book is going to be a valuable tool to help us collect, structure and analyze their input and experiences. I considered at a lot of other books before choosing this one -- it hit the mark for me as a manager-level view of user and task analysis, tool development and implementation. It's not a computer programming book (many user-interface books are focused on the specifics of GUI -- even including code), and it's not a book targeted at psychology majors (they hit the basics of cognitive psychology -- but from a "this is what users are like" perspective, not a theoretical standpoint.) It's an excellent starting point for the rest of us.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Starting Point
Review: This is the first book I've read on this subject, and it was a great starting point for me. I'm responsible for implementing a system that, in its current state, is not "user-friendly" enough. This was the book I was looking for to help me express the criticality of the user's perspective to the designers as we embark on the redesign. A starting point for our dialog will be the classification of users into "novices, advanced beginners, competent performers, and experts," and their corresponding characteristics. The example showing that approximately 80% of users do not move beyond the "advanced beginner" stage on a tool that they use relatively infrequently. This matches our experiences. For our product to be successful, we need to focus on these users, who will be the majority of our population. I also take to heart the reactions that can emerge from the shock of seeing real users working with the prototype or product for the first time: defensiveness, despair, rush to redesign, and the thought that it can all be solved by training or documentation. Been there, felt that. Through reading this book, I have a new appreciation for the complexity of the task ahead of us, and the tremendous amount of time and attention it is going to take to get it right. Fortunately, we have a user community that is currently very eager to help us get it right -- this book is going to be a valuable tool to help us collect, structure and analyze their input and experiences. I considered at a lot of other books before choosing this one -- it hit the mark for me as a manager-level view of user and task analysis, tool development and implementation. It's not a computer programming book (many user-interface books are focused on the specifics of GUI -- even including code), and it's not a book targeted at psychology majors (they hit the basics of cognitive psychology -- but from a "this is what users are like" perspective, not a theoretical standpoint.) It's an excellent starting point for the rest of us.
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