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Effective UI
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Effective UI
Jonathan Anderson, John McRee, Robb Wilson,
and the EffectiveUI Team
Beijing  ·  Cambridge  ·  Farnham  ·  Köln  ·  Sebastopol  ·  Taipei  ·  Tokyo
www.it-ebooks.info
Effective UI
by Jonathan Anderson, John McRee, Robb Wilson, and the EffectiveUI Team
Copyright © 2010 EffectiveUI. All rights reserved.
Printed in Canada.
Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472.
O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are
also available for most titles (). For more information, contact our corpo-
rate/institutional sales department: (800) 998-9938 or
Editor:
Steve Weiss
Development Editor:
Jeff Riley
Production Editor:
Rachel Monaghan
Copyeditor:
Genevieve d’Entremont
Proofreader:
Nancy Kotary
Indexer:
Julie Hawks
Cover Designer:

Specifications Are Inherently Flawed 90
Commitments to Scope Are Untenable 92
Relish and Respect the Unexpected 92
Intolerance of Uncertainty Is Intolerable 93
Effective Requirements 94
How Framework Requirements
Are Built 97
Reexamining the Three-Legged Stool 99
Commitments You Can Live Up To 101
Effective Process 102
Development Methodology 103
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
1 Building an Effective UI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Understanding UX 4
What Good UX Accomplishes 6
Why Engagement and Good UX Matter 10
The Elements of Engaging UX 11
Redefining Two Fundamental Terms 32
Design 32
Development 34
2 Building the Case for Better UX . . . . . . . . 37
Why Now Is the Moment for UX 40
Motive 40
Means 48
Opportunity 50
Winning Support for Better UX 53
Stakeholders 53
Education 57
Quantifying the Business Value 67
Materializing and Proving the Concept 67

User Attributes 152
Exercises to Identify Key User
Attributes 153
Creating Business Requirements 160
Defining “Requirement” 161
Exercises to Develop Business
Requirements 163
Maintaining Stakeholder Buy-in 169
6 Getting to Know the User . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Valuing User Research 173
Combating Pressure to Skip
User Research 175
Key Concepts in User Research 177
Empathy 177
User Goals Versus Product Features and
Tasks 178
Qualitative Versus Quantitative
Research Methods 180
Who Should Be Involved in the
Research 182
Finding Research Participants 184
Determining the Research Sample Size 185
Making Recordings 188
Research Through Speaking with Users 190
User Interviews 190
Structured Interview Techniques 191
Research Through Direct Observation 193
Analyzing the Research Observations 196
Discovering Personas 196
Weaving User Stories 198

Environments 234
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Contents

vii
8 The Iterative Development Process . . 235
Regarding “Process” 239
Iterations and Feedback 239
The Scope of Iterations 243
Prioritizing the Subjects of Iterations 245
Finishing Iterations with Something
Complete 246
Estimating Iterations 247
Basic Iterative Process 248
Mapping Progress and Feedback Across
Multiple Cycles 252
Increasing the Amount of Feedback 254
Iteration in Sub-Ideal Project Approaches 256
Strict Waterfall Process 257
Iteration in a Big Design Up Front
(BDUF) Process 261
9 Release and Post-Release . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
Managing Expectations 265
The Alpha and Beta Releases 266
Receiving Orderly Feedback 268
Last-Minute Housekeeping 269
User Documentation 270
And Champagne Corks Fly… 271
Adoption 272
Post-Release 273

time, though, there was a generally poor understanding of how to build
UX-focused software products. Many large companies were struggling to
build a UX competency from within and nding that UX requires far more
than just graphic design and IT. Prestigious digital, interactive, and ad agen-
cies were trying to get a foothold in the eld but were failing with remark-
able regularity. The promise of better UX and the benets it confers was, and
still is, harder to achieve than many companies expect.
This is why our publisher, O’Reilly Media, asked us to write this book. They
noted the disparity between the growing expectations and demands for better
UX and the poor success rate of companies trying to meet that demand. And
so it’s for the companies and people who recognize the importance of gaining
competency in building better UX in software that we have written this book.
x Preface
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This is for product managers who need a risk-reducing roadmap, for tech-
nologists and designers who need guidance and advocacy, and for business-
people who need to understand and manage UX-focused initiatives.
O’Reilly is perhaps the best known and most respected provider of knowl-
edge resources created by and made for technology innovators. We’ve been
presenting at their Web 2.0 conferences for years, and our employees’ book-
shelves are lled with O’Reilly books. We’re thrilled to add a book to their
prestigious animal series. If you’re wondering what the rainbow lorikeet on
the cover has to do with effective UIs, it’s simple:
What does the dog say? Woof, woof! What does the cow say? Moo, moo!
What does the rainbow lorikeet say? Ui, ui!
It’s a privilege to be participating in the present fast-growing trend of build-
ing better UX in software. EffectiveUI has been riding the UX trend as it has
grown from a small surge into a tidal wave. At a time when other companies
were focusing either on design or on engineering, we built our company
around the marriage of the two.

resources, we’ve created a page on our website to complement this book:
/>We’ll also be posting updates on Twitter. Please follow us: @uitweet.
Two of us, Jonathan and Robb, also work as managing editors for UX
Magazine (). The magazine is a good source of current ideas
and information about the UX strategy, technology, and design.
Thanks and Acknowledgments
As we’ve said, this book represents the thoughts and contributions of over
a hundred people. We’re very grateful to have these people as our friends,
coworkers, teachers, and supporters. We’re also deeply grateful to O’Reilly
Media for giving us this opportunity and for toiling long and hard to help us
pull this off.
xii Preface
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Thank You to Our Virtual Coauthor
The role of a project manager is a tough one—you’re responsible for the results
of a project, and at the same time you’re entirely dependent on other people
doing the majority of the work. Eileen Wilcox may not have written any of
the words that went into this book, but without Eileen none of the words in
this book would have been written. Eileen also conducted much of the early
research and interviews that went into this book, and her thoughtful questions
and follow ups ensured that the information captured was useful.
Just like software engineers and UX designers, writers need a balanced mea-
sure of stern pressure and reassuring supportiveness. And since this book
arose from the ideas of so many people inside our company, the amount of
coordination the writing effort required was enormous. Eileen provided that
pressure, support, and coordination masterfully.
Eileen’s ideas and contributions are everywhere in this book, so we consider
her a virtual coauthor.
Thank You to Our Friends at O’Reilly Media
Thanks rst to Steve Weiss for coming up with the idea for this book, and

Joy Sykes
Tony Walt
Since our people are our company, the best way to know the face of
EffectiveUI is to know the faces of our staff. For this reason, we’ve included a
portrait section at the back of this book to pay homage to our people. It’s done
in the style of a yearbook class page as a further tribute to Herff Jones, the
yearbook company that let us use their product as an example in this book.
Additional Thank-Yous
The following people outside of EffectiveUI helped us a great deal:
Catherine Anderson
Truman Anderson
Constantinos Demetriadis
Tony Hillerson
Gregg Peterson
Alexandre Schleifer
xiv Preface
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Thanks to Our Partners
Thank you to our friends at Herff Jones and National Geographic for gener-
ously allowing us to use their projects as examples in this book.
Safari Books Online®
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Everyone is feeling a frustration that has the same root cause, but each is expe-
riencing it from a different perspective and consequently reaching a different
conclusion. The way companies have historically handled software develop-
ment projects is extremely awed, and everyone knows it without having any
idea of what to do differently. And the ways IT and software engineering teams
have coped with business constraints and responded to the need for better UX
have also been weak and are undermined by entrenched problems and awed
approaches. These issues combine to cripple the ability of project teams—no
matter how talented they may be—to produce great results. Succeeding in
building a product with a superior UX quality is a particularly signicant
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challenge that requires an intensity of design and engineering productivity,
and anything that interferes with that diminishes the quality of the result.
And so as we asked ourselves how could we best assist people in succeeding
at building products with great UX, we arrived at an unexpected answer:
focus less on training people in how great design is done; focus more on how
to create a setting where great product design can occur and succeed. If you
are opening a restaurant, just having a great chef isn’t enough; the chef’s tal-
ent will be meaningless if the restaurant is in a bad location, the wait staff
is poorly trained, the kitchen doesn’t have a supply of fresh food and isn’t
well equipped, and the restaurant isn’t marketed effectively. The artistry of
exceptional cooking can’t easily be taught in book form, but the business of
being a restaurateur can. Likewise, the skills of great UX architects, visual
designers, and software engineers are gained through individual profes-
sional experience rather than through books, so the most valuable informa-
tion we can offer in helping people succeed in building UX-driven products is
information on how to enable the success of those professionals.
If you’re one of those professionals and want to help your organization or
clients become better at building software, or if you’re a businessperson try-

User experience is, as the name suggests, the experience a user has when
interacting with software. Just as is the case with music, a software product’s
UX falls somewhere along a range between subjectively good and subjec-
tively bad. This is obvious enough, but in that simple analogy are a number
of truths that are often misunderstood or overlooked in software develop-
ment. The process of creating good music involves a combination of the
underlying mathematical principles of music that govern how we interpret
sound, the technical skill required to write and play the music, and the artis-
tic sense required to know how to make it all come together pleasingly
in the subjective consciousness of the intended audience. Take
away any of those elements, and you make it impossible
to bring new music into being. Also, the quality of music
is not an objective one, but is specic to the subjective
experience of the individual listener. A group of people
might love techno and hate country, but that doesn’t
mean that techno is objectively good and country is
objectively bad; it just means that if you’re making music
for that group, you need to bear their subjective needs in
mind.
All of that is also the case in software UX. There’s no such thing as
objectively bad or good UX, only subjectively bad or good experi-
ences specic to the user. The process of creating great UX involves
some combination of quasi-scientic disciplines such as human factors
SCIENCE ART
CRAFTSMANSHIP
UX
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engineering, usability, and information architecture; the technical skills to
produce not only great UX and user interface design but also the working

this book isn’t specic to innovation, design, technique, or artistry; it’s about
how you can clear the way for innovation, design, technique, and artistry to
come together successfully.
Understanding UX 5
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What Good UX Accomplishes
Having a strong UX in your software product is a good goal to have, but high-
quality UX isn’t in and of itself the real goal. It’s the means to another, more
important end that, though it’s easy to appreciate rsthand, is incredibly
hard to describe. Good UX enhances user engagement, and UX design is the
art of creating and maintaining user engagement in software. Whereas UX is
an abstract concept and UX design is a professional discipline, user engage-
ment is the all-important subjective experience.
This naturally begs the question, what is engagement? This is best explained
through analogies.
Engagement as immersion
The easiest, most intuitively obvious example of engagement in software is the
experience of playing a great video game. Video games—particularly those of
the rst-person variety—aim to create a high degree of immersion for players.
Deep immersion occurs when the
player becomes less and less aware
of his surroundings, and his percep-
tion of the space separating him and
the screen starts to fade. His experi-
ence of the game becomes one of
being the character rather than just
being a guy in a chair manipulating
the controller. If you’ve ever seen
someone leaning his body to one
side to try to steer a car in a game or

audience members watching an engaging play infer and build that fourth wall
in their minds, ignoring its absence. Just as the gamer loses awareness of the
space between the screen and himself, and of the screen itself, the audience
members become so engrossed in the action that the theater around them
fades away. If an actor ubs a line, or a baby starts crying in
the back of the theater, that fourth wall is “broken,” detract-
ing from the experiential quality of the play. Rather than
being engrossed in the plot and action, the audience
members are suddenly reminded that they’re in a theater
and have been sitting in their chairs for an uncomfortably
long time.
What Good UX Accomplishes 7
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