UX Best Practices How to Achieve More Impact with User Experience

Helmut Degen · XiaoWei Yuan

Dec 2011 · McGraw Hill Professional

About this eBook

Evolve to a user-centered product development philosophy

Deliver superior products and escalate your market share by employing real-world user experience success strategies from global corporations. Featuring in-depth case studies from Yahoo!, Siemens, SAP, Haier, Intuit, Tencent, and more, UX Best Practices: How to Achieve More Impact with User Experience offers proven methods for instituting user-centered design in industrial environments.

Discover how to integrate user experience activities into product development processes for investment and consumer goods in different regions, reduce product complexity, increase product quality, and boost the bottom line. This comprehensive guide covers a variety of user experience techniques, such as analyzing user needs and expectations, creating design concepts, prototyping, using agile development, conducting usability testing, developing user interface guidelines, defining user interface patterns, and specifying metrics.

• Communicate objectives and user requirements in design briefs
• Establish end-to-end UX-centered development policies
• Foster collaboration between managers, designers, and engineers
• Integrate user experience metrics into business target frameworks and the product development process
• Employ agile development and design thinking methods
• Collect, measure, and analyze usability data
• Employ a User Experience Evaluation System to identify problems
• Convey and assess design ideas quickly using prototypes
• Achieve consistency across products with UI patterns and libraries

About the author

Helmut Degen is a senior consultant for requirements engineering for Siemens Corporate Research, Inc. in Princeton (NJ). Before, Helmut worked as a senior user experience manager for Vodafone Global Marketing in Duesseldorf, and for the Siemens User Interface Design center in Munich (both in Germany). Helmut holds a PhD in information science from the Freie Universitaet Berlin (Germany) and a master in computer science from the Universitaet Karlsruhe (Germany). Helmut is member of the Usability Professional Association and the Society of Computer Science in Germany (Gesellschaft fuer Informatik).

Xiaowei Yuan served as a Research Scientist at Siemens AG in Munich, Germany in the area of user interface. In 2000, he was selected to head Siemens’ User Interface Design Center located in Beijing, China, which provides support for the localization of Siemens products in cooperation with the company’s User Interface Design Centers in Munich, Germany and Princeton, New Jersey. In 2001, he founded Beijing ISAR User Interface Design Co. ltd, the first company that provides user research, user interface design and usability evaluation services for enterprises in China. Xiaowei possess over 10 years of professional experience in the field of user experience and usability engineering. He is the Commissioner of the Standardization Administration of the People’s Republic of China and National Human Ergonomics Standardization Technical Committees. He also serves as an adjunct professor at Beijing University's Industrial Design Department. Xiaowei earned a Ph.D. degree in sociology of industry from Tübingen University in Germany.