Built for Use: Driving Profitability Through the User Experience

User experience is a new field that marries business strategy, technology, design and usability into the development of electronically-mediated customer experiences. The field is becoming increasingly important. Despite the recent collapse in the technology market, user experiences continue to impact success for businesses that deliver their products and services online. As more "dotcoms" fail, firms such as Amazon.com and Yahoo! that practice customer-centric design continue to prove that they have an edge that creates business value. The quality of the user experience will become even more critical to business success over the next years. With no seminal books available and no well-established methodologies, the industry needs a book that will deliver strategies for business-relevant, user-centric design, written in a tone for executives, managers and practitioners who need the knowledge, but don't have the time to read a dense, heavy tome.
Based on the author's work as a MIT Media Lab-trained user experience strategist (and 14-year industry veteran) with many global Fortune 1000 firms and dotcoms, Built for Use will help readers rapidly become fluent in the language and best practices of user experience strategy and design, and understand how to: * Develop a user experience strategy that builds trust and loyalty among customers * Establish what customers expect online, define metrics for success and catalyze a team to deliver the experience * Gain insight into which parts of the process must be rigorous and which can be accelerated without compromising quality * Ensure that the customer experience will be valued and usable, now and in the future * Influence and change the culture of the enterprise to become "customer-centric" in the design process * Approach fixing user experiences that are broken and failing in the market Built for Use will be the first book to integrate business strategy and user experience in an easy-to-read format. Diagrams will relate business strategies to user experience mechanisms, showing what does and doesn't work for customers.
Whenever possible, statistical data gathered from actual site usage for "before" and "after" case studies will show how better design actually resulted in measurable increase in effectiveness in the customer experience. Each chapter includes "Accelerators" allowing readers to understand what levers they can control and the resultant effects upon the online experience, at any stage of the life cycle. Strategic as well as tactical solutions are discussed in detail with case studies that analyze relevant issues, define relevant success metrics, and discuss strategic issues such as productivity enhancement and risk reduction. Like Crossing the Chasm, it quickly articulates the "why" and the "how to" information in a way that is not dense or overly academic, something which is common in many user interface design books. Interviews have been secured with customer experience strategy executives at the top eServices firms (Zefer, Digitas, etc) as well as client companies for Human Logic such as State Street Global Advisors, and will be used along with case studies from these firms.