You don't need to be convinced. You know that usability is key to the success of any interactive system-from commercial software to B2B Web sites to handheld devices. But you need skills to make usability part of your product development equation. How will you assess your users' needs and preferences? How will you design effective solutions that are grounded in users' current practices? How will you evaluate and refine these designs to ensure a quality product?

Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction is a radical departure from traditional books that emphasize theory and address experts. This book focuses on the realities of product development, showing how user interaction scenarios can make usability practices an integral part of interactive system development. As you'll learn, usability engineering is not the application of inflexible rules; it's a process of analysis, prototyping, and problem solving in which you evaluate tradeoffs, make reasoned decisions, and maximize the overall value of your product.

* Written by prominent HCI educators who understand how to teach usability practices to students and professional developers.
* Interleaves HCI theory and concepts with a running case study demonstrating their application.
* Gradually elaborates the case study to introduce increasingly sophisticated usability engineering techniques.
* Analyzes usability issues in realistic scenarios that describe existing or envisioned systems from the perspective of one or more users.
* Emphasizes the real world of usability engineering-a world in which tradeoffs must be weighed and difficult decisions made to achieve desired results.
* Includes a companion Web site which provides additional case studies in a multimedia format, along with a Java application for creating and editing scenarios. This site also provides instructors with sample syllabi, lecture slides and notes, in-class exercises, solutions to textbook exercises, additional project ideas, and links to other HCI resources.

My favorite part about this book is the fact that it actually has a section on user documentation - something that is lacking in many books on the subject of usability, and the achilles heel of many projects.


Great and applicable for other domains   June 2, 2007
Hussein Ahmed (Virigina, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

A very good book mainly focused on Scenario-Based analysis which you can actually use in every other subject and aspects of your life (even if you are choosing between trips). I bought this book as a text book for an HCI subject in VT and it was interesting to follow.


Horribly Dry and Boring with Little to Recommend   February 1, 2004
9 out of 22 found this review helpful

Man, where do I start? I was actually looking forward to a college class on designing easy-to-use computer applications. Boy did I not get what I was looking for, in large part due to this book.

First off, this textbook is boring as heck. Almost everything is black and white, and the design scheme of the book alone makes one not want to read it. In fact, this book is a poor example of usability in its own right.

So that's the looks. The actual content is not particularly useful either. Instead of giving practical, real-world advice, it spends too much time waxing strong about a stupid model called "scenario-based development," as I remember. This is basically the common-sense and annoying pet theory of the authors.

Finally, the examples and interface illustrations in the book seemed so out of date for a book copyrighted in 2002. Just a thought.

Overall: Reads like an academic book written for stuffy academics. Little practical information on designing good applications is provided.