The Usability Engineering Lifecycle
By Deborah J. Mayhew

get  it

If you get only one hard-core book on user experience design, this is the one. Despite the title, it actually covers most of user experience design. While it trades breadth for depth, its one of the few books that acknowledges that not everyone has time to do things the "right" way, so it also covers how to scale-down methods, as well as how to substitute quick-and-dirty alternatives. And the author is actually willing to put some time estimates on how long particular steps may take. The main weakness is its failure to address issues of content, information architecture and visual design (the author does traditional software development), although at least the book acknowledges these may be important if you're doing web-related projects. ::

Reviewed June 5, 2001

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