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The UX Book. Agile UX Design for a Quality User Experience. Edition No. 3

  • Book

  • June 2025
  • Elsevier Science and Technology
  • ID: 6006178
The UX Book: Agile Design for a Quality User Experience, Third Edition, takes a practical, applied, hands-on approach to UX design based on the application of established and emerging best practices, principles, and proven methods to ensure a quality user experience. The approach is about practice, drawing on the creative concepts of design exploration and visioning to make designs that appeal to the emotions of users, while moving toward processes that are lightweight, rapid, and agile-to make things as good as resources permit and to value time and other resources in the process.

Designed as a textbook for aspiring students and a how-to handbook and field guide for UX professionals, the book is accompanied by in-class exercises and team projects.

The approach is practical rather than formal or theoretical. The primary goal is to imbue an understanding of what a good user experience is and how to achieve it. To better serve this, processes, methods, and techniques are introduced early to establish process-related concepts as context for discussion in later chapters.

Table of Contents

PART 1. INTRODUCTION
1. What is UX and UX design?
2. The Wheel: UX processes, lifecycles, methods, and technique
3. Scope, rigor, complexity, and project perspectives
4. Agile lifecycle processes and the Funnel Model of Agile UX
5. Prelude to the process chapters
6. Background: Introduction

PART 2. UNDERSTAND NEEDS
7. Usage research data elicitation
8. Usage research data analysis
9. Usage research data modeling
10. UX design requirements: User stories and requirements
11. Background: Understand Needs

PART 3. DESIGN SOLUTIONS
12. The nature of UX design
13. Bottom-up vs. top-down design
14. Generative design: Ideation, sketching, and critiquing
15. Mental models and conceptual design
16. Designing the ecology and a pervasive information architecture
17. Designing the interaction
18. Designing for emotional impact
19. Background: Design

PART 4. PROTOTYPE CANDIDATES
20. Prototyping

PART 5. EVALUATE UX
21. UX evaluation methods and techniques
22. UX evaluation: UX goals, metrics, and targets
23. Preparation for empirical UX evaluation
24. Empirical data collection methods and techniques
25. Analytical data collection methods and techniques
26. UX Evaluation: Data analysis
27. UX evaluation: Reporting results
28. Background: UX evaluation

PART 6. AGILE UX AND CONNECTIONS TO AGILE SE
29. Connecting agile UX with agile software development
30. Background: Agile connections

PART 7. AFFORDANCES AND DESIGN GUIDELINES
31. Affordances in UX design
32. The interaction cycle
33. UX design guidelines
34. Background: Affordances and UX design principles

Authors

Rex Hartson Professor Emeritus, Computer Science, Virginia Tech, USA. Rex Hartson is a pioneer researcher, teacher, and practitioner-consultant in HCI and UX. He is the founding faculty member of HCI (in 1979) in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. With Deborah Hix, he was co-author of one of the first books to emphasize the usability engineering process, Developing user interfaces: Ensuring usability through product & process. Hartson has been principle investigator or co-PI at Virginia Tech on a large number of research grants and has published many journal articles, conference papers, and book chapters. He has presented many tutorials, invited lectures, workshops, seminars, and international talks. He was editor or co-editor for Advances in Human-Computer Interaction, Volumes 1-4, Ablex Publishing Co., Norwood, NJ. His HCI practice is grounded in over 30 years of consulting and user experience engineering training for dozens of clients in business, industry, government, and the military. Pardha S. Pyla Senior User Experience Specialist and Lead Interaction Designer for Mobile Platforms, Bloomberg LP, USA. Pardha Pyla is an award-winning designer and product strategist with deep expertise in envisioning and delivering industry-leading products. He is the founding member of multiple thriving product and design (UX) practices that were responsible for producing successful enterprise software solutions in use across many industries. He is a pioneering researcher in the area of coordinating software engineering and UX lifecycle processes and the author of several peer-reviewed research publications in human-computer interaction and software engineering. He has received numerous awards in recognition of his work in design thinking, research, teaching, leadership, and service.