Observing the User Experience

Preface

Why This Book?

You’ve picked up this book for a reason. You think it’s important to know who is using the products you’re making. And, you know, you’re right. Finding out who your customers are, what they want, and what they need is the start of figuring out how to give it to them. Your customers are not you. They don’t look like you, they don’t think like you, they don’t do the things that you do, they don’t have your expectations or assumptions. If they did, they wouldn’t be your customers; they’d be your competitors.

This book is designed to help you bridge the gap between what you think you know about your users and who they really are. It’s not an academic treatise. It’s a toolbox of ideas with which you can understand how people ...