Communicating the User Experience: A Practical Guide for Creating Useful UX Documentation

Richard Caddick · Steve Cable

Aug 2011 · Sold by John Wiley & Sons

About this ebook

A clear and focused guide to creating useful user experience documentation

As web sites and applications become richer and more complex, the user experience (UX) becomes critical to their success. This indispensible and full-color book provides practical guidance on this growing field and shares valuable UX advice that you can put into practice immediately on your own projects. The authors examine why UX is gaining so much interest from web designers, graduates, and career changers and looks at the new UX tools and ideas that can help you do your job better. In addition, you'll benefit from the unique insight the authors provide from their experiences of working with some of the world's best-known companies, learning how to take ideas from business requirements, user research, and documentation to create and develop your UX vision.

• Explains how to create documentation that clearly communicates the vision for the UX design and the blueprint for how it's going to be developed
• Provides practical guidance that you can put to work right away on their own projects
• Looks at the new UX tools and ideas that are born every day, aimed at helping you do your job better and more efficiently
• Covers a variety of topics including user journeys, task models, funnel diagrams, content audits, sitemaps, wireframes, interactive prototypes, and more

Communicating the User Experience is an ideal resource for getting started with creating UX documentation.

Ratings and reviews

The synopsis implies that this book is a lot more detailed than it actually is. If you are looking for 250 pages of screenshots showing step by step guides to producing simplistic diagrams in PowerPoint or Omnigraffle then this book may be for you. If you are looking for insightful discussions and interesting points of view from leaders in the UX field (which CXpartners are) then this book is definitely not for you. On a side note it’s also worth pointing out that this is a terribly designed book to read on the screen with the downloadable pdf burdened by a huge slug and bleed marks so does not scale properly. Omnigraffle is also Mac only and no alternatives are given for PC users. Poor showing for a book about delivering a good UX experience.

Why is this so expensive? Amazon has the paperback for US$29.69 (A$28.53 right now), and yet here it's almost A$40. Bandwidth wasn't *that* expensive the last time I checked. Sheesh,

About the author

Richard Caddick (London) is managing director for cxpartners, a London-based design firm. Richard has been working on digital projects for over 14 years, working most recently with clients such as Expedia, Jaguar, The Cooperative Bank, Nokia and The Planning Portal.

Steve Cable (London) is a User Experience Consultant for cxpartners. Steve has worked on many research and design projects, most recently for clients including Nokia Music, Virgin Trains, Planning Portal and Saga Holidays.