| Built for Use: Driving Profitability
Through the User Experience
By Karen Donoghue
McGraw-Hill Trade, 2002.
Reviewed by Lise Hansen
Karen Donoghue’s Built for Use should be required
reading for any manager responsible for designing engaging and profitable
user experiences. Working from the premise that “successful
user experiences deliver a firm’s value proposition—the
brand promise—to customers in the most effective and appropriate
way,” Donoghue explores the balance of business goals and
profitability with user needs and expectations.
Part One creates a compelling case for linking customer experience
with profitability and return on investment. Sensitive to the post-boom
environment, Donoghue focuses on user experience strategies and
metrics to achieve short-term business success, which evolves over
time into longer-term ROI benefits. Of the strategies and metrics
she discusses, establishing trust is most critical. Trust must be
infused throughout the user experience, and changes that foster
trust will have both short- and long-term impact.
Part Two outlines best practices for creating valued user experiences.
Targeting managers responsible for online user experiences, Donoghue
introduces the disciplines that should be involved and offers a
behind-the-scenes glimpse of their processes and roles. She outlines
a development process based on up-front consumer input, information
architecture, rapid prototyping, extreme programming, and pervasive
usability, and she clearly ties each to its impact on measuring
success and profitability.
Part Three expounds on the near- and long-term future of designing
ubiquitous user experiences. In the short term, teams will need
a portfolio of design, usability, and analytical techniques to measure
user and business success. Long-term, our efforts will extend to
smart systems and the wet/dry interface between biology and electronics.
In the spirit of works by Don Norman, Jakob Nielsen, and Alan Cooper,
Built for Use lays an excellent framework for individuals
new to managing and designing online user experiences. Those with
experience will also benefit: Donoghue’s emphasis on metrics
and profitability offers another means for measuring the outcomes
of our work.
Lise Hansen is director of information architecture
at Yamamoto Moss.
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