Surveys That Work
Surveys That Work by Caroline Jarrett, Rosenfeld Media, 2021
My book will help you to:
- Decide whether a survey is the right thing to do;
- Choose how to go about it; and
- Be confident that you will get good, useful data.
You’ll work through a 7-step process for creating a survey, starting with “Goals” and ending with “Reports”. Along the way, you’ll meet the Survey Octopus that connects the issues that you need to think about – and, in the gaps between the issues, the errors that can trip you up.
If you buy from Rosenfeld Media, you get a free e-book with your paper copy: Surveys that Work from Rosenfeld Media page.
Forms that Work
Designing Web Forms for Usability by Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney, Elsevier, 2008
Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability clearly explains exactly how to design great forms for the web. The book provides proven and practical advice that will help you avoid pitfalls, and produce forms that are aesthetically pleasing, efficient and cost-effective. It features invaluable design methods, tips, and tricks to help ensure accurate data and satisfied customers. It includes dozens of examples – from nitty-gritty details (label alignment, mandatory fields) to visual designs (creating good grids, use of colour).
This book isn’t just about colons and choosing the right widgets. It’s about the whole process of making good forms, which has a lot more to do with making sure you’re asking the right questions in a way that your users can answer than it does with whether you use a drop-down list or radio buttons. In an easy-to-read format with lots of examples, the authors present their three-layer model – relationship, conversation, appearance. You need all three for a successful form: a form that looks good, flows well, asks the right questions in the right way, and, most important of all, gets people to fill it out. Liberally illustrated with full-colour examples, this book guides readers on how to define requirements, how to write questions that users will understand and want to answer, and how to deal with instructions, progress indicators and errors.
User Interface Design and Evaluation
User Interface Design and Evaluation by Debbie Stone, Caroline Jarrett, Mark Woodroffe and Shailey Minocha, Elsevier 2005
User Interface Design and Evaluation provides an overview of the user-centered design field. It illustrates the benefits of a user-centered approach to the design of software, computer systems, and websites.
The book provides clear and practical discussions of requirements gathering, developing interaction design from user requirements, and user interface evaluation. The book’s coverage includes established HCI topics—for example, visibility, affordance, feedback, metaphors, mental models, and the like—combined with practical guidelines for contemporary designs and current trends, which makes for a winning combination. It provides a clear presentation of ideas, illustrations of concepts, using real-world applications. This book will help readers develop all the skills necessary for iterative user-centered design, and provides a firm foundation for user interface design and evaluation on which to build.
Chapters in other books
I’ve contributed chapters to these books:
- Jarrett, C. and Romano Bergstrom, J. (2014) “Forms and Surveys” in Eye tracking in user experience design edited by Romano Bergstrom, J and Schall, A. published by Morgan Kaufmann / Elsevier
- Jarrett, C., Summers, K., and Redish, J. C. (2013) “Design to read: Designing for people who do not read easily” in Rhetorical Accessibility: At the Intersection of Technical Communication and Disability Studies, edited by Lisa Meloncon, Baywood Publishing Company Inc.
- Stirling, V. L. and Jarrett, C. “Open University Case Study” in Tullis, T. and Albert, W. Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics, Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier
- Jarrett, C. (2012) “UX of Transactions”, in Usability in Government Systems, User Experience Design for Citizens and Public Servants, edited by Buie, E. and Murray, D. Morgan, Kaufmann/Elsevier
Full list of my publications and presentations.