Book Review
Department Editor: Warren Keuffel, wkeuffel@computer.org

Is the User Experience Observable?

Harekrishna Misra

Observing The User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research, Mike Kuniavsky, Morgan Kaufmann, 2003, ISBN 1-55860-923-7, 576 pp., US$44.95.
A product’s ultimate stakeholder is its user, to whom the product developer usually gives the least importance. Market research provides input into this area. We can ascertain a software development project/product’s behavior based on its success rates under various conditions in the market. But measuring a product’s success rate, ascertaining the user’s role, and finding a definitive link to the user’s expertise are daunting tasks for software product developers. Verifying user experience and applying it to product development are easier said than done.

This book attempts to provide a systematic approach for developers to understand users by addressing the attributes a practitioner would consider relevant. Of the 13 techniques discussed, the author spends the most time on mental mapping, usability, and contextual inquiry. While the book focuses on mapping the user’s involvement and stakes in a software product, it also discusses the user’s possible role in a system development life cycle. This example-supported approach is the book’s strength. Besides the development and use of metrics for survey data collection, the author discusses data analyses in detail to increase focus on the user. The book will certainly help product designers, product developers, information architects, and even product marketing managers capture user requirements and behavior and reflect them in products.

However, a programmer or system analyst might find it absurd to conduct research on user experience before embarking on a project. Furthermore, the book tends to be too subjective. Chapters that deal with research methodology could have been kept short. Although the book could be a good resource for software engineering practitioners and project managers, a chapter on the software engineering process and product models—focusing on user attributes and mapping these to the models—would have given clarity to the issues. Nonetheless, while discussing the issue “measure that is measurable,” the book strongly provides tools for practicing measurement through certain metrics.

If you’re an information systems researcher, this book isn’t for you. You’d find better explanations in a good book on research methodologies, which would abundantly explain survey techniques, data collection, data analyses and interpretation, and so forth. The same is true for systems analysts and programmers: the time you’d need to organize user experience and map it to your product wouldn’t get you very far.