Cone Trees

As a contributing author and an industry practitioner, I am happy to see the book, UX Storytellers- Connecting the dots, finally out and it looks great. The book is a collection of forty two stories contributed by various user experience experts from around the globe, each of whom share a particular real (or based on a real) experience of theirs working in their respective areas of expertise within the UX domain. Some of my favorite authors in the book include Deborah Mayhew (author of Cost-Justifying Usability and The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook among many others ) and Aaron Marcus (author of The Cross-GUI Handbook for Multi-Platform User-Interface Design and Mobile TV: Customizing Content and Experience among others).

If you work in user experience at any level, this book will offer you some fantastic takeaways, the kinds you are lucky to get when you come across someone really experienced at a conference or even professional meet ups.

Jan Jura (@IATV) did a fantastic job of conceptualizing, coordinating and putting all of this together, which took him over a year. And judging the success of the book by the buzz in the UX community since it came out a week ago, it definitely looks like its been worth all the effort he put in.

My chapter in the book is a story which aims at helping user experience professionals understand the real challenges involved when trying to introduce User-Centered Design (UCD) techniques in your organization where your goal is to ultimately integrate UCD into your organization’s Product Development Life Cycle (PDLC). It talks about how arming ones self with technical capability is only half the story, the other half being a team’s ability to effectively deal with soft issues and successfully engage with stakeholders. I hope you will learn from it and be able to put it to good use if you come across such a situation or are already in such a (tricky) situation.

You can download or view the book online at: http://uxstorytellers.blogspot.com/2009/01/ux-storytellers-connecting-dots.html. A paid print version will follow, I’ve read quite a bit of it, and from all the value it provides, it definitely will be worth buying.

You can also read the book below. My story begins from page 412 of the Srcibd reader or page 434 of the book.