Built for Use: Driving Profitability Through the User Experience

Built for Use, by user experience strategist Karen Donoghue, is a compendium of knowledge that anyone hoping to build a truly usable user interface should possess. Donoghue draws on her many years of experience as an industry consultant to present analyses of how websites and other human-machine interfaces succeed and fail. She also channels her extensive contacts in industry and academia to present sage advice and best practices for achieving usability. With a post-bubble eye sharply focused on the bottom line, Donoghue emphasizes that experiences users love don't necessarily coincide with the experiences they will pay for, and that revenue must be the ultimate driver of design choices.Reading Built for Use, it's hard not to picture oneself as one of Donoghue's clients, and the book as the voice of Donoghue. The book has the pragmatic tone of a consultant who is aware of the fact that your time (and hers) is valuable. She emphasizes the points that need emphasizing, and doesn't spend a lot of time considering ultimately rejected alternatives. You hire Ms. Donoghue, or read her book, because you need to know how to create the best -- and most profitable -- user interfaces right now, and you can't afford to make costly mistakes. From her war stories and references, it's pretty clear that she knows how, and she won't beat around the bush very much before telling you.One also gets the impression that Donoghue's clients span a broad range of knowledge and experience. In Part I, I counted, I believe, five different occurrences of a variant of "Don't put a tripwire at the checkout counter!" -- in other words, don't put an obstacle in front of a customer who's already been convinced to buy something, has taken out their credit card, and is trying to complete a transaction. "Don't make your first page impossible to get through!" is another oft-repeated dictum. Evidently more than a few of Donoghue's clients insisted on making those mistakes. On the other hand, her detailed accounts of best-practice project planning for usability will be of interest to seasoned veterans of successful projects. Along with her pragmatic tone, Donoghue endeavors to formulate general principles and practices that underlie the best, most-usable interfaces. It was revealing to me to read about the meticulous and principled planning behind one of my personal favorites, the Fidelity Brokerage website, that distinguishes it from similar, but less usable competitors.Donoghue takes a more speculative point of view in Part III, which discusses future developments. There, she expresses confidence that we will soon be designing for systems that cross the "wet-dry interface" - in other words, parts of the system will be composed of traditional electronic circuits, and other parts will consist of biological components such as neurons in a human body.Donoghue's clients, and the readers of this book, are a demanding audience. They need to know in practical terms what to do r

This is the book to read and pass along to Marketing, R & D, Sales, etc. It will help you know the words to say to justify spending time and money on user experience research and design. I read it before starting a new job in Human Factors and passed it up the management chain to widen the perception of what it's all about. It gives you and "them" a common language.

.....especially if everyone who is a part of the product creation, business and marketing "food chain" reads it! Karen clearly, immediately and with great impact explains how and why we like some stuff and not others, and that this IS the bottom line. She relates human characteristics like trust, loyalty, familiarity, curiosity, desire to product success and profitability. This is the first business book that tangibly quantifies "soft" human characteristics and ties them to value, profitability and staying-power in the marketplace. Her case studies are great examples of how a user-centric approach worked from concept, design, testing through product launch.Donoghue's other key point feels sometimes forgotten in the rush-to-market. That it takes many disciplines (dare I say a village) on every side of the problem, working together to create best practices and best solutions, and it doesn't stop at product launch. This approach has to be one's design and business attitude for life. As I was reading the book, I thought of my parents in West Virginia, friends in Bangkok, a client in Seattle- and me at work (wherever that may be) trying to educate my clients to this perspective. How much easier it would be if business goals and user experience design disciplines sat together with real people (users) to create products. Gee, wouldn't that be great! and fun! and a lot more satisfying on all counts.Hey, Karen, do you have quantity discounts? I'd like to give one to every one in my current and future "food chain"! Or maybe it could be distributed with the Yellow Pages... : )

San Jose, CA, USAAs a marketing director of a B2B dot com, I found Donoghue's book hit the nail on the head. Her book offers sound advice that will outlive most companies-Internet or conventional. Placing customers first is the cornerstone of all successful business strategies built to last, yet this fundamental premise is frustratingly absent in the many high technology companies, large and small---in Silicon Valley. Many of these companies, still stubbornly cling to a feature/product-focus, which drag their customers around in an unresponsive or poorly response-able product or user experience. To be sure, the challenge of finding out what customer WILL WANT in technologies customers don't even know how to pronounce, is a daunting task for all marketing managers. But there are ample case studies to draw from, both in Donoghue's book, and from the marketing intelligence already developed by other industries. New and unimaginable products will continue to be introduced at increasingly rapid speeds, but human behavior around new product adoption has some very predictable elements. Karen Donohue's book is a timely analysis of what went wrong with a "great idea" called the Internet. While the Internet is still alive ---the critical lessons Donoghue speaks about did not have to be learned the hard way. Reading this book will help marketing managers avoid another unnecessary repetition of this recent, painful business failure.

This is the first book on user experience design to strike the critical balance between business and design contexts. No rants about Flash animation here. Practitioners of every discipline will come away with an enhanced vocabulary and appreciation of what it takes to effectively evaluate and design on-line experiences that are compelling, usable, and profitable. Several case studies illustrate the concepts. The author has considerable experience bridging the chasm between the concerns of professional managers and the realm of creative designers. She shares a great deal of her wisdom in this book. I've worked as a Internet strategy consultant and I wish I could have shared this book with clients and colleagues years ago. The dot.com meltdown has not changed a fundamental truth: the on-line experience provides an opportunity for a very intimate relationship with customers. Ms. Donoghue's new book will help your business take advantage of this fundamental truth.