Built for Use: Driving Profitability through the User Experience

The big winners in the Ebusiness arena are those who practice customer-centric design. More than simply a matter of jazzy graphics, customer-centric design is about earning the trust and loyalty of a dedicated customer base by making the quality of the user experience the centerpiece of the total online strategy. As illustrated by the examples of the many big winners covered in this book, for those who practice customer-centric design, the online user experience is a major part of a company's value. And, as shown by the experiences of the many dot-com also-rans cited, anything less than a total commitment to the user experience is, at best, an expensive, humbling exercise in futility. While there are a multitude of books on the art and science of user interface and Web site design, until now none has focused on the online user experience from the corporate strategist's and marketing manager's perspectives. The first guide to linking business strategy with the art and science of online user experience, Built for Use offers a total approach to the planning and development of ebusiness experiences that build long-term customer loyalty and drive long-term profits. Drawing upon her experiences as a user-experience strategist for numerous Fortune 1000 firms, Karen Donoghue explores key business strategy and user-experience issues in a concise, jargon-free style for nontechnical managers. With the help of fascinating and instructive before-and-after case studies from State Street Corporation, Fidelity Investments, Trellix Corporation, and other major players in the ecommerce arena, Donoghue makes a strong business case for customer-centric design practices. She describes user experience and design-strategy best practices for everything from putting together and managing an interdisciplinary team dedicated to delivering superior user experience to measuring the design strategy success and ensuring continued customer satisfaction. Built for Use is required reading for marketing professionals at companies actively pursuing an online presence, as well as for the development teams with which they collaborate. Praise for Built for Use: "The best interface is the absence of one. I am not a user; I am me. It is about time that designers of digital experiences thought hard about why a dog has so much more interface intelligence than any computer. It is about time that senior executives realized that quality of an experience is their business. Said differently, the icing is the cake."­­Nicholas Negroponte, Founding Director, MIT Media Laboratory, Author of Being Digital "Read this book if you want to learn why your company may be electronically rude to its customers today and how to avoid it in the future. Karen Donoghue is a thought leader and expert who helps companies evaluate and design user experiences that welcome and engage their customers. Her deep experience, knowledge, and insights are captured in this insightful book. It should be a must-read for every executive, manager, and designer who cares about the relationships their company is developing with its online customers."­­Hans Peter Brondmo, Digital Impact Fellow, Author of The Engaged Customer "Design sense, and sensibility, are all-too-rare rare qualities. Karen Donoghue has them innately and in abundance. Her user interface designs have a hallmark simplicity and elegance that belie a lifetime of insight and observation of the real ways that real people relate to complex information technologies. In Built for Use she shifts her incisive design eye from the intimate area of person/machine interfaces to the vast field of business interactions. The result is a lucid look at business interfaces with real products, real services, and real customers."­­Michael Hawley, Director of Special Projects, MITKaren Donoghue is the author of 'Built for Use: Driving Profitability through the User Experience', published 2002 under ISBN 9780071383042 and ISBN 0071383042.