Praise for User Experience Research

“The content and design are so well done! User Experience Research reminds me of all the amazing things I learned during my time at Lextant—countless things that frame how I think about product development. So many researchers (not to mention designers, product managers, and engineers) would benefit from this.”
—Jessica Owen, Senior User Researcher, Meta

“Current user research tools have proven to be ineffective in informing the business decision-making process. This book gives you a step-by-step proven process on how to transform user information into customer insights and how to use these insights to inform innovative value-generating business decisions.”
—Victor Ermoli, Dean of the School of Design, Savannah College of Art and Design

“The research approach described in User Experience Research produced the most transformative work I have seen.”
—Rob Moser, Global Head of Experience Design, Ford Next

“The Ideal Experience approach has the longest shelf life of all UX Research methods. I am still using the insights from the Ideal Collaboration project we did with Lextant over a decade ago. Marty and Spencer offer a methodology that will raise the quality of your thinking, not just the quality of your research.”
—Lada Gorlenko, Senior Director of Research, MURAL; Co-Founder, Board of Directors, IxDA

“Humanity’s well-being rests to an astonishing degree in the hands of those who research, interpret, and design our experiences of moments, objects, events, and environments. Yet, many of the design industry’s methods and practices have failed this consequential obligation. In one simple, holistic framework, Gage and Murrell have broken through this impasse by marrying humans’ ideal states of being and their correlated design attributes. This is an essential manual for anyone seeking a process for dealing with the growing complexity of human experience while designing for a future of well-being for humanity and our biosphere.”
—Nita Rollins, PhD, former Executive Director of Experience Trends and Semiotics at IBM iX, co-first author of The Open Brand

The Fuzzy Front End Gets Demystified in This Next-Generation User Research Guide

The first phase of the design thinking process is arguably the most crucial, as this is when human insights are leveraged to define value for customers.  Yet this so-called "empathize" phase is often deemed optional or is executed poorly. This degrades the entire innovation process that follows by permitting preexisting biases and guesswork that make value creation a precarious bet.

In User Experience Research: Discover What Customers Really Want, a human factors psychologist and an industrial designer have devised a foolproof first phase that addresses the shortcomings of the design thinking process. Based on their forty years of generative research experience in multiple industries, this is the definitive guide to user experience research. This repeatable approach is grounded in six key principles that connects users’ desired emotional states to an actionable articulation of an experience. It also provides guidance on creating ideal experience frameworks that communicate clearly with all stakeholders, from business leaders to design practitioners.

User Experience Research: Discover What Customers Really Want  is an indispensable, fully illustrated, step-by-step manual for anyone seeking a more predictable pathway to the design of new or improved experiences that users truly desire and would find valuable.