The potential role of UX research in designing a printed book

Abstract

The article addresses the potential role of user research in the design process of a printed book with a particular focus on the issue of designing the reader’s experience. It also presents the research methodology used in the user-centered design and user-experience design devised by Iga Mościchowska and Barbara Rogoś-Turek. The authors present this topic in the context of interactive product design, however, for the purpose of this article, an attempt was made to implement the presented methodology to the study of user experience of a printed book. Another important perspective for this analysis is the concept presented in the publication by Tomasz Bierkowski and Ewa Repucho entitled Typografia dla humanistów, where the factors which need to be analyzed and taken into account while designing the reader’s experience were enumerated. The article points to the benefits which might result from studying user experience of books and engages in polemics with the claims that methods of that kind are not usable when designing paper books. The text also includes the most important assumptions of user experience studies, as well as the proposed way of understanding the role of typography and issues related to readability in the context of UX research.