The UX Book

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.

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 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.