Travis D., Hodgson P. Think Like a UX Researcher: How to Observe Users, Influence Design, and Shape Business Strategy

CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. — 307 p.Currently, user experience (UX) researchers are in an enviable situation. There are many more jobs than people suitably trained to fill them. Practitioners are swamped with work. This has obvious advantages—but it comes with its own share of problems.
Not least of these problems is the difficulty of maintaining one’s own area of expertise by staying up to date with best practice and new ideas.
We know from the training courses we deliver to UX researchers that many are too busy (and may feel too knowledgeable) to read a comprehensive, introductory text on user experience. In fact, if you’re like us, you probably have more than one UX book on your shelves that you started but couldn’t finish.
That’s why UX researchers turn to shorter articles and blog posts to keep their knowledge fresh. But blog posts aren’t curated. It’s not clear how they fit together because they lack the kind of structure imposed by a book. And they vary in quality—both in the quality of the content and the quality of the writing.
With printed books feeling overwhelming and the quality of blog posts being too variable, it’s not clear what UX researchers are meant to do to stay
current.
This book aims to bridge the gap by providing user experience content that is authoritative but at the same time easily digestible. It contains a series
of essays on UX research. Although you could read the book from cover to cover, we have planned the book on the assumption that you will dip in
and out of it, somewhat like a bedside or coffee-break reader. Think of it as a launch pad for UX research ideas. But if you prefer to read linearly, we’ve organized the chapters (and the sequence of essays within each chapter) to build upon each other.