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Built for Use (by Karen Donoghue)
This book aims to look at the online user experience from the perspective of a corporate strategist or a marketing manager. It makes the case for a focus on user experience, and it does so very often. Apart from making the case, it didn't do much else for me, which was kind of disappointing because I was already a "convert" looking for a practical book.
And that was the big problem with "Built for Use" for me. The book could easily be condensed to a quarter of its size without losing any important arguments or thoughts. And even those arguments are about as general as you could find them. Whenever there might be room for interesting details to be revealed or processes to be explained, the author makes a big turn around them and indulges into yet more generalities. I was severely missing the "how" amidst all the "why".
When you're writing a book that does not offer specific solutions, but merely outlines concepts in laymen's terms, you want to make sure that it's written in a convincing way: concise, to the point, and full of good examples. None of which this book offered to me. It wasn't neither that ("useful") nor that ("interesting").
It might be that the book could appeal to some people (judging from the Amazon.com reviews, it surely does), but it did not at all to me.
- Book Title: Built for Use: Driving Profitability through the User Experience
- Book Author: Karen Donoghue
- Year of Publication: 2002
- Buy the book at Amazon.com.
- My rating:
More book reviews of mine here.