Observing the User Experience

Goodman, Kuniavsky and Moed produced the standard reference on user research methods, running to six hundred pages and covering interviews, surveys, diary studies, usability testing, card sorting, ethnographic fieldwork and analytics, with the strengths and the cost of each. Every method gets the practical detail, meaning how many participants, how to recruit them, how long it takes and what the output looks like at the end. There are chapters on planning a research programme and on reporting findings so that somebody acts on them. It is a book to own and consult rather than read through, and it is what to reach for when choosing between methods.