ABSTRACT
In July 2006, we began working together on a series of studies designed to assess the usability of a new college writing handbook. Our purpose here is to report on these usability studies and their implications concerning the methods for bringing user experience design principles into the product development cycle in educational publishing. Our successful collaboration has demonstrated how a pilot project which was originally intended only to demonstrate the value of usability testing to the revision of textbooks eventually impacted the product development process for a major publisher. Specifically, we found that exploring the limits of complexity in the
CONTENTS
Introduction ...........................................................................................................68 Background of the Product ..................................................................................68 Finding Opportunity in “Failures” ..................................................................... 70 Unexpected Complexity ....................................................................................... 73
Test Methodology ........................................................................................ 74 Selected Results ............................................................................................ 76 Implications .................................................................................................. 78
Collaboration and Rhetoric .................................................................................. 79 Driving Innovation in Product Development ................................................... 82 Conclusion .............................................................................................................84 Reader Take-Aways ..............................................................................................85 References ...............................................................................................................86
handbooks we tested helped us move from what we call an accommodationist model of textbook design to a constructivist model.
