Interaction design

Interaction design

• Designing interactive products to support the way

• The design of spaces for human communication and

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 Goals of interaction design
• Develop usable products
– Usability means easy to learn, effective to use and
provide an enjoyable experience
• Involve users in the design process

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 Four basic Activities of IXD
• Identifying needs and establishing
requirements
• Developing alternative designs that meet those
requirements
• Building interactive versions so that they can be
communicated and assessed, and evaluating
them.
• Evaluating them i.e. measuring their
acceptability

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Three Key Characteristics of IXD process
• User Focus: the need to focus on users meaning that a
development will involve users, it can encourage focus
on such issues and provide opportunities for evaluation
and user feedback.
• Specific usability criteria and user experience goals:
should be identified, clearly documented, and agreed
upon at the beginning of the project.
• Iteration: allow designs to be refined based on
feedback. As designers and users engage with the
domain and start to discuss requirements then different
insights into what is needed, what will help, what is
feasible will emerge.

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 Importance of Interaction Design
• Poor design can:
– reduce user productivity
– increase learning times
– increase errors
– induce frustration
– lead to system rejection by the user
• Poor design is easy, good design is hard

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 Which kind of design?
• Number of other terms used emphasizing what is
being designed, e.g.
– user interface design, software design, user-centered design, product
design, web design, experience design (UX)

• Interaction design is the umbrella term covering all

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 HCI and interaction design

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 What do professionals do in the ID
business?
• interaction designers - people involved in the design of all
the interactive aspects of a product
• usability engineers - people who focus on evaluating
products, using usability methods and principles
• web designers - people who develop and create the visual
design of websites, such as layouts
• information architects - people who come up with ideas of
how to plan and structure interactive products
• user experience designers (UX) - people who do all the
above but who may also carry out field studies to inform
the design of products

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 Good design
• Takes into account:
– Who the users are – People
– What activities are being carried out -
Activities
– Where the interaction is taking place -
Context
– What technologies are used - Technologies
• User-centric View of Design Problems: PACT
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 PACT Analysis
• ‘User-centric’ framework for thinking about a design
problem
• Take each category –---People-Activities- Context and
Technology --- and work through it
• Use the analysis to help focus/orient early design
thinking
• Important: revisit the analysis
– As you get deeper into the problem the analysis
should change and/or get richer

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 People: Who are the
users/stakeholders?
• Those who interact directly with the product
– those who manage direct users
– those who receive output from the product
– those who make the purchasing decision
– those who use competitor’s products
•Three categories of user (Eason, 1987):
– primary: frequent hands-on
– secondary: occasional or via someone else
– tertiary: affected by its introduction, or will
influence its purchase
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 People: variability
Consider range of characteristics of people
• Physiologically
– Age differences, physical abilities
• Psychologically
– Attention, perception, memory
– Forming the right ‘mental model’
• Socially and Culturally

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People: What are the users’ capabilities?
• Humans vary in many dimensions:
— size of hands may affect the size and positioning of
input buttons
— motor abilities may affect the suitability of certain
input and output devices
— height if designing a physical kiosk
— strength - a child’s toy requires little strength to
operate, but greater strength to change batteries
— different abilities (e.g. sight, hearing, dexterity)

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 Activities
• What is the overall purpose of the activity?
– What has to be satisfied
– Hedonic vs. Pragmatic
• Temporal aspect
– Regular or infrequent
– Time pressure
– Continuous or interruptions
– Processing time
• Cooperation
– One or more actors
• Complexity
– Well defined or vague?
• Safety critical
– Impact of error (how much?)
• The nature of the content
– Type of data to be processed
– Type of media

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 Context
• Where does the interaction occur?
– Physical context
• Noise, light, time
• In the office, on the move
– Social context
• Individual activity, group activity
• Computer-mediated social activity
• Social norms
– Psychological context
• Motivation, attitudes
• Cognitive demands
• Level of arousal
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 Technology
• Input
– Getting data in; getting commands; security
• Output
– video vs. photographs; speech vs. screen
• Communication
– Between people, between devices, speed,
• Content
– What data in the system: a web site is all about
content
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 Key characteristics of IXD
– Focus on users early in the design and
evaluation of the artifact
– Identify, document and agree specific usability
and user experience goals at the beginning of
the project
– Iteration is inevitable. Designers never get it
right first time

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 Understanding user needs
• ASK-WATCH-ANALYSE
• Users rarely know what is possible they can’t tell you what
they ‘need’ to help them achieve their goals
• Take into account people’s capabilities
• Look at existing tasks:
– their context
– what information do they require?
– who collaborates to achieve the task?
– why is the task achieved the way it is?
• Envisioned tasks:
– can be rooted in existing behaviour
– can be described
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 Develop alternative design
• Considering alternatives is important to ‘break
out of the box’
• Designers are trained to consider alternatives,
software people generally are not
• How do you generate alternatives?
— ‘Flair and creativity’: research and synthesis
— ‘Seek inspiration’: look at similar products
or look at very different products
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How do you choose among alternatives?
• Evaluation with users or with peers, e.g. prototypes
• Technical feasibility: some not possible
• Quality thresholds: Usability goals lead to usability
criteria set early on and checked regularly
— safety: how safe?
— utility: which functions are superfluous?
— effectiveness: appropriate support? task coverage,
information available
— efficiency: performance measurements
– Easy to learn
– Easy to remember how to use

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 User requirements
What is done?
• Identifying needs
– Understand as much as possible about the
user, their work and the context of use
– See PACT analysis
• Establish a set of ‘stable’ requirements
– Requirements MUST be justified and related
to data
– Set up clear success metrics, usability, user
experience requirements
 How is it done?
• Data gathering activities
• Data analysis activities
• Expression as ‘requirements’
• All of this is iterative

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 Requirements type
• Functional
– Fundamental or essential characteristics of
the product
– Describe what the product has to do or what
processing actions it is to take
– Historically the main focus of requirements
activities

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 Example
• For a multifunction PDA
– Phones function must be accessible while
connected to the internet
• For a nuclear power control system
– The system will be able to monitor the
temperature of the reactors

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 Requirements type (2)
• Non functional
– Properties that the functions must have
– Describe the constraints that there are on the
system and its development
– Covers a number of aspects of design: image,
usability, performance, maintainability, security,
cultural acceptability, etc.
– As important as functional requirements for the
product's success.

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 Example
• For a multifunction PDA – Look and feel
– The system must present an up-market,
business like image
• For a nuclear power control system - Usability
– Warnings signals MUST be clear and
unambiguous

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 User requirements
• Users: Who are they?
– Characteristics: ability, background, attitude to
computers
• System use: novice, expert, casual, frequent
– Novice: step-by-step (prompted), constrained, clear
information, e.g., wizard prompting
– Expert: flexibility, access power
– Frequent: short cuts
– Casual/infrequent: clear instructions, e.g., menu
paths

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 Data-gathering
• Studying documentations
• Researching similar products
• Interviews
• Questionnaires
• Observation

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 Studying documentation
• Procedures and rules are often written down in
Manuals
• Good source of data about the steps involved in
an activity and any regulations governing a task
• Good for understanding legislation, and getting
background information
• Not to be used in isolation
• Advantage: No stakeholders time
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 Observation
• Naturalistic observation:
– Spend time with stakeholders in their day-to-day
tasks, observing their activities
• Gain insights into stakeholders’ tasks
• Good for understanding the nature and context
of the tasks
• It requires time and commitment from a member
of the design team, and can result in a huge
amount of data

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 Questionnaires
• A series of questions designed to elicit specific
Information
• Questions may require different kinds of answers:
– simple YES/NO; choice between pre-set answers;
Comment
• Often used in conjunction with other techniques
• Can give quantitative or qualitative data
• Good for answering specific questions from a large,
dispersed group of people
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 Interviews & Focus Group
• Structured, unstructured or semi-structured
• Good for exploring issues
• Time consuming and may be infeasible to visit
everyone
• Focus group
– Group interviews
– Good at gaining a consensus view and/or highlighting
areas of conflict
• Props e.g. sample scenarios of use, prototypes, can be
used in interviews

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 Which techniques to gather req?
• Depends on:
• Amount of time, level of detail and risk
• associated with the findings
• Knowledge of the analyst
• Kind of task to be studied:
– Sequential steps or overlapping series of
subtasks
– High or low, complex or simple information?
– Task for a layman or a skilled practitioner?
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 Problems with data gathering -
stakeholders
• Identifying and involving the right people:
– users, managers, developers, customer reps?,
union reps?, shareholders?
• Involving stakeholders
– workshops, interviews, workplace studies,
participatory design
• ‘Real’ users, not managers
– traditionally a problem in software engineering,
but better now
– Availability of key people

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 Problems with data gathering (2)
• Requirements management: control, ownership
• Communication between parties:
— within development team
— with customer/user
— between users: different parts of an organization
use different terminology
• Domain knowledge distributed and implicit:
— difficult to dig up and understand
— knowledge articulation
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 Guidelines
• Involve all the stakeholder groups
• Involve more than one representative from each
stakeholder group
• Use a combination of data gathering techniques
• Support the process with props such as
prototypes and task descriptions
• Run a pilot session
• Consider carefully how to record the data
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 Personas
• A persona is a fictional user, with a made-up life
• Capture user characteristics
• Not real people, but synthesized from real user
characteristics
• Should not be idealized
• Bring them to life with a name, characteristics,
goals, personal background
• Develop multiple personas

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Sarah Red is 24 years old and works as a web-designer at Zurich Insurance.
Sarah has a BA in three dimensional design from Middlesex University and an
M.A. in computer related design from the Royal College of Art in London. She
has worked for Zurich for the past two years and quite openly dislikes it.

Sarah is a talented designer who likes to experience the latest technology and
has won several prises for her design. Yet, in her job she has to be very
conservative. She prepares forms for on-line quotes and provides general
information about the company to their web-customer.

Sarah dreams of joining a designer studio in London where she could fulfil her
talent. The current position, although boring, offers a good salary and the
possibility of living in London where . she can search for her dream job.

Sarah works in the web-development team. Her new boss is Elisabeth, a software engineer
who does not understand the user experience and is more concerned with technical details
than with design. Sarah is reasonably free in her job, as nobody seems to care.

Sarah’s been told that the company has adopted edgeConnect and that her group will start
using it by next month. Sarah is worried about this decision: she thinks it is going to kill
creativity and to make her job even more boring. She has been told that she will be in charge
of designing a template layout for the car sector, and she wished she could use flash. She
welcomes anyway the idea of a change and a training course sounds interesting.
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 Scenarios
• Key technique in interaction system design
• (Rosson and Carroll 2002)
• Iterative tools to be used throughout the design
Process
• User stories = informal narrative description
which reports about user tasks and activities.
– Short snippets which tend to focus on the
user needs and motivations to perform a task rather
than on the use of a technology.
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 The summer term has just started and Fritz, a computerscience student at the
Technische Universität Dresden, has decided to attend a course on "User Interface
generation for Web Services”. He logs in the University portal and accesses an
overview of all lectures, sport and language courses. He tries to subscribe to the UI
course but the system indicates a timetabling conflict with the course on ‘Service-
oriented Architecture” he previously registered to. Fritz sign in an Italian course, which
is automatically displayed in his personal weekly calendar.

• Fritz wonders whether he should change his study plan to accommodate for the UI
course. Thus he decides to ask other students’ opinion. He joins a chat room, but
nobody is there. Fritz waits for other students while working on an assignment
using the library service.

• Looking at the watch on the portal, he realizes that he has only 30 minutes before a
date with a girl met at the University online social network. Fritz switches on his PDA
and logs into the university portal while boarding the tram. A beep indicates that
some students have joined the chat room and after a short negotiation he manages
to swap his place from the “Service-oriented Architecture” course with a place in the
User Interface course with another student. The system is automatically updated, just
in time for his date.

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