Czech information architect Jan Jursa has been the driving force behind a year-long project to put together the book UX Storytellers. His motivation was to compile a book that captured the kind of anecdotal stories about digital projects that you hear at IA and UX conferences, and to also reflect the international diversity of the discipline.
Among the 40 or so contributions are stories from leading IA thinkers such as Andrew Hinton and James Kalbach, and from Clearleft’s Cennydd Bowles, who has also just recently published his own book with James Box: Undercover User Experience Design.
As Information Architect at Guardian News & Media, I’ve contributed a chapter titled Using the right tools for the job. It tells the story of last year’s redesign of the Guardian Jobs homepage. The key elements of the tale are some “guerilla usability testing” at the London Graduate Fair, evolving designs from initial sketches to fully-fledged wireframes, and finally some lab testing of a mixed fidelity prototype at our supplier Madgex in Brighton.
I wasn’t able to include all the illustrations I wanted in the book, and so I’ve posted them up to a Flickr set, featuring six sketches, wireframes, prototypes and design iterations from the project.
You can view a preview of UX Storytellers below, and the book is now available as a free download in PDF format, with other ebook formats to follow.