IBM authors have written a number of books that will help you create easy-to-use products and services.
Practical Speech User Interface Design (Human Factors and Ergonomics)
by James R. Lewis
If speech is the most natural form of communication, then why do we often find it so hard to use speech to communicate with machines? In short, machines aren't human, so using speech to communicate with them is anything but natural. The techniques for designing usable speech user interfaces are not obvious, and must be informed by a combination of critically interpreted scientific research and leading design practices. This book draws upon the key scientific disciplines of psychology, human-computer interaction, human factors, linguistics, communication theory, and service science; the artistic disciplines of auditory design and script writing; and experience in the assessment, design, and deployment of real-world speech applications. The goal is a comprehensive yet concise survey of practical speech user interface design for interactive voice response (IVR) applications.
Published by CRC Press; 1 edition (December 10, 2010), 344 pages
ISBN 9781439815847
Outside-In Software Development: A practical approach to building successful stakeholder-based products
by Carl Kessler and John Sweitzer
This seven-chapter, 212-page book by IBM VP Carl Kessler and IBM Distinguished Engineer John Sweitzer describes the outside-in approach to building software by identifying stakeholders and their goals, understanding their organizational context, and staying aligned with these goals throughout product development, delivery, and support. This is not a book advocating a new process, even though there are numerous references to Agile development practices (indeed, Tom Poppendieck has written the foreword for the book). It is a description of the various outside-in best practices, methods, and principles that can be applied to any development process, including a waterfall process. It does not prescribe a set of activities or artifacts, but rather focuses on how your current activities and development artifacts can be modified to incorporate these outside-in best practices.
UX Practitioners will find their taxonomy of stakeholders is especially useful: principals (who make the purchase decision), users (who interact with the product), partners (who are responsible for deploying your product), and insiders (the extended product team). This taxonomy provides a good structure for identifying, understanding, prioritizing, and stayed aligned with stakeholder goals. An entire chapter focuses on consumability: what it is, how to measure it, and how to improve it.
The book is written for all software development disciplines, but the "Leader's Role" section in each chapter and the chapter "Becoming an Outside-In Developer" make it especially applicable to project managers and development leads. The book is available online at no cost to IBMers on Books24x7.
Published by IBM Press 2007, 212 pages
ISBN 9780131575516
Designing Easy-to-use Websites
by Vanessa Donnelly
This book provides practical, proven guidelines on how to design usable e-business websites; websites that not only contain up-to-date, effective information that is easy to find, but sites that actually make it easy for users to do all the tasks that they have come to the site to achieve.
As large company websites grow, maintenance and management costs are skyrocketing, major design changes are becoming extremely difficult, and businesses are having a greater difficulty evaluating the impact of redesigns on usability and site effectiveness. In this book, one of IBM's leading Web specialists presents a powerful, structured process for creating enterprise-class sites that are easy to use, easy to manage, and easy to change. Based on IBM's own advanced research and processes, Designing Easy-to-Use Websites borrows the best techniques from content management, software design, usability and other key disciplines giving companies a complete blueprint for every step of the Web design and redesign process.
For a review of this book, go to www.webreference.com (link resides outside of ibm.com).
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Published by Addison Wesley 2001, 429 pages
ISBN 0201674688
Designing Effective Wizards: A Multidisciplinary Approach
by Daina Pupons Wickham, Dr. Debra L. Mayhew, Teresa Stoll, Kenneth June Toley III, Shannon Rouiller
All you need to know to build wizards your users will love:
- Extensive lists of questions for gathering requirements
- Iterative design and evaluation techniques
- Guidelines for general page layout, controls, and navigation
- Visual design tips and techniques for attractive and enticing wizards
- Launchpad solutions for linking wizards
- Advice for interactive feedback, error prevention, error recovery, and on-line help
- Accommodate any user—experts and novices, worldwide audiences, multiple platforms, plus accessibility for users with special needs!
Designing Effective Wizards: A Multidisciplinary Approach is the first "nuts and bolts" how-to guide for designing wizards that help users perform their tasks. This book brings together key insights from a multidisciplinary team, including usability experts, technical writers, and visual designers—presenting a start-to-finish process for effective wizard design. The authors identify key issues and challenges encountered during the wizard development process and IBM's best solutions.
Includes...
- CD-ROM that contains interactive samples to help you explore the concepts of color, typography, layout, navigation, and launchpads for wizards. It also contains the screens from the case-study installation
- Extensive examples throughout
- A start-to-finish case study
- Practical checklists, summaries, and sample forms
Published by Prentice Hall 2001, 400 pages
ISBN 013092377X
Designing for the User with OVID: Bridging User Interface Design and Software Engineering
by Dave Roberts, Dick Berry, Scott Isensee, John Mullaly
Object, View, and Interaction Design (OVID) addresses the need to improve the quality and efficiency of designing user interfaces. It applies many of the tools and techniques used in object-oriented code design to the domain of the user interface. OVID brings rigor to the design process and produces output that feeds directly into code design. OVID helps to create interfaces that meet user requirements and are easy to use.
For more information, download the tutorial materials (2.5 MB) from the Make IT Easy 2001 conference.
Published by Macmillan Technical Publishing 1998, 187 pages
ISBN 1578701015
Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design and Development
by R.J. Torres
Using extensive practical examples, the Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design and Development illuminates today's best practices for user interface design, usability, and user-centered development. Robert J. Torres introduces user interfaces from three points of view: the user, the developer, and the system. Next, he introduces a complete user-centered UI development process, beginning at the highest level and then drilling down to each phase of the lifecycle. For every stage, Torres offers clear principles, specific guidelines, and practical heuristics for self-assessment. Coverage includes:
- Planning, user/task analysis, and user profiling
- Conceptual design, high-level design, and detailed design
- Simulation and prototyping
- Implementation, evaluation, iteration, and deployment
- Risk management in user interface development
- Choosing the optimal tools for building and managing user interfaces
- Understanding the role of managers and project leaders in UI development
Whether you're a developer, project manager, usability specialist, IT manager, software customer, or researcher, Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design and Development will be your definitive resource for building great user interfaces.
Published by Prentice Hall PTR 2001, 375 pages
ISBN 0130912964
User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach
by Karel Vredenburg, Scott Isensee, Carol Righi
The start-to-finish guide to User-Centered Design! Make technology products easy to obtain, learn, and use new methods, tools, technologies, and real-world case studies CD-ROM: Tools and resources for introducing, deploying, and optimizing User-Centered Design.
User-Centered Design can make any technology product or service far more successful by optimizing your customers' total experience from purchase and unpacking through support, upgrades, and beyond. Now, for the first time, there's a practical guide to introducing, deploying, and optimizing UCD. The field's leading experts present specific methods and techniques for building products that are simpler, more elegant, more powerful, and more profitable. A complete lifecycle approach to UCD that delivers breakthrough efficiency, including:
- Evaluating your current products and aligning your entire organization to support UCD
- Improving everything your customers see, hear, and touch
- Applying UCD to software, hardware, Web sites, and services for both external and in-house use
- Optimizing UCD today — and anticipating trends that will impact tomorrow's products
The accompanying CD-ROM contains several UCD practitioner tools, sample presentations, AVI movies introducing key UCD concepts, a detailed template for tracking UCD metrics, and tools for carrying out UCD activities.
Published by Prentice Hall 2001, 300 pages
ISBN 0130912956