Review: “Customers Included”
I’ve just finished reading “Customers Included” by Mark Hurst & Phil Terry, and – at the risk of exposing the secrets of the Customer/User Experience field – feel I must make public my opinion of this little book.
It’s Great!
….
OK, I’ll go into a bit more detail – of course, you can also read an excerpt, as well as some more well-deserved praise, over at customersincluded.com.
The greatest thing about this book, I think, is that it doesn’t profess to equip you with a magic wand. While it does break the complex world of C/UX (as we still call it here) down into some understandable components, and while it does say “… with a single step” right on the cover, Mark & Phil don’t mince words: It takes work. Sustained work.
Of course, in order to motivate you and make you understand why all this sustained work is a good idea (since it really, really is), the book gives some great examples of how user understanding can mean the difference, not just between success and failure but, as in the examples of aeronautical design, litterally between life and death.
Seriously, after reading about how they put the landing gear retraction handle right next to the flaps handle in a plane cockpit – essentially turning it into a “flip this to crash” lever – simply because the idea of the pilot grabbing the wrong one of two adjacent, identical handles did not occur to anyone, you’re flabberghasted they still make that kind of mistakes in design. But they do.
Of course, it’s not all bad examples – the good examples abound, and most importantly, the book’s explanation of how to find out what users really think, and how they actually interact with your product, well, if it doesn’t make you want for your company to address this issue immedieately, maybe you just don’t like being successful that much.
In short: If you’re at an executive level in a business dealing with users/customers (a.k.a. “litterally any business ever”), or if you’re a designer, if you work with innovation, interaction, or if you just want to understand the field better, you can’t get much better than starting with this book.
