Understanding Users: Designing Experience through Layers of Meaning

This book explores how our civilization has evolved its technical infrastructure to help us make sense of our contemporary information infrastructure and online existence, incorporating historical, cultural, and aesthetic approaches to situating information and its underlying technologies across time in the collective, lived experiences of humanity. It suggests that traditional ways of studying information use are limiting our understanding of what it means to be an information user and hinder our efforts at being truly user-centric in design.

Format: Hardback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 17 April 2023
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Based on the user-centered design movement, this book provides a comprehensive examination of how our civilization has developed its technical infrastructure to serve human purposes and help us make sense of our modern information infrastructure and online existence. The author incorporates historical, cultural, and aesthetic approaches to situating information and its underlying technologies across time in the collective, lived experiences of humanity.

In today's digital environment, user experience is crucial to the success of any product or service. However, as the user population expands to include everyone, designing for people who vary in skills, abilities, preferences, and backgrounds is challenging. This book provides an integrated understanding of users and the methods that have evolved to identify usability challenges, facilitating cohesive and earlier solutions. The book treats information creation and use as a core human behavior based on acts of representation and recording that humans have always practiced. It suggests that the traditional ways of studying information use, with their origins in the distinct layers of social science theories and models, are limiting our understanding of what it means to be an information user and hinder our efforts at being truly user-centric in design. Instead, the book offers a way of integrating the knowledge base to support a richer view of use and users in design education and evaluation.

Understanding Users is aimed at those studying or practicing user-centered design and anyone interested in learning how people might be better integrated in the design of new technologies to augment human capabilities and experiences.

Weight: 650g
Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367459277