The aim of interaction design is to redress this concern by bringing usability into the design process.

In
essence, it is about developing interactive products that are easy, effective, and enjoyable to use-from
the users' perspective.

1.2 Good and poor design

A central concern of interaction design is to develop interactive products that are usable. This is
generally meant easy to learn, effective to use and provide an enjoyable user experience. When
considering the usability of a design, therefore, it is important to take into account where it is going to
be used and who is going to use it.

1.2.1 What to design

Designing usable interactive products thus requires considering who is going to be using them and
where they are going to be used. Another key concern is understanding the kind of activities people are
doing when interacting with the products. The appropriateness of different kinds of interfaces and
arrangements of input and output devices depends on what kinds of activities need to be supported.

There are many ways of designing the way users can interact with a system (e.g., via the use of menus,
commands, forms, icons, etc.).

A key question for interaction design is: how do you optimize the users' interactions with a system,
environment, or product so that they match the users' activities that are being supported and
extended? One could use intuition and hope for the best. Alternatively, one can be more principled in
deciding which choices to make by basing them on an understanding of the users. This involves:

 taking into account what people are good and bad at

 considering what might help people with the way they currently do things
 thinking through what might provide quality user experiences
 listening to what people want and getting them involved in the design
 using "tried and tested" user-based techniques during the design process

1.3 What is interaction design?

By interaction design, we mean designing interactive products to support people in their every day and
working lives. In particular, it is about creating user experiences that enhance and extend the way
people work, communicate and interact. Winograd (1997) describes it as "the design of spaces for
human communication and interaction." In this sense, it is about finding ways of supporting people. This
contrasts with software engineering, which focuses primarily on the production of software solutions for
given applications.

In a nutshell, interaction design is related to software engineering

1.3.1 The makeup of interaction design

It has always been acknowledged that for interaction design to succeed many disciplines need to be
involved. The importance of understanding how users act and react to events and how they
communicate and interact together has led people from a variety of disciplines, such as psychologists
and sociologists, to become involved. Likewise, the growing importance of understanding how to design
different kinds of interactive media in effective and aesthetically pleasing ways has led to a diversity of
other practitioners becoming involved, including graphic designers, artists, animators, photographers,
film experts, and product designers.

1.3.2 Working together as a multidisciplinary team

Bringing together so many people with different backgrounds and training has meant many more ideas
being generated, new methods being developed, and more creative and original designs being
produced. However, the down side is the costs involved. The more people there are with different
backgrounds in a design team, the more difficult it can be to communicate and progress forward the
designs being generated.

What this means in practice is that confusion, misunderstanding, and communication breakdowns can
often surface in a team. The various team members may have different ways of talking about design and
may use the same terms to mean quite different things. Other problems can arise when a group of
people is "thrown" together who have not worked as a team.

1.3.3 Interaction design in business

Interaction design is now big business. Website consultants, startup companies, and mobile computing
industries have all realized their pivotal role in successful interactive products. To get noticed in the
highly competitive field of web products requires standing out. Being able to say that your product is
easy and effective to use is seen as central to this. Marketing departments are realizing how branding,
the number of hits, customer return rate, and customer satisfaction are greatly affected by the usability
of a website. Furthermore, the presence or absence of good interaction design can make or break a
company.

1.4 What is involved in the process of interaction design?

Essentially, the process of interaction design involves four basic activities:

1. Identifying needs and establishing requirements.

2. Developing alternative designs that meet those requirements.
3. Building interactive versions of the designs so that they can be communicated and assessed.
4. Evaluating what is being built throughout the process.

These activities are intended to inform one another and to be repeated.

In addition to the four basic activities of design, there are three key characteristics of the interaction
design process:

1. Users should be involved through the development of the project.

2. Specific usability and user experience goals should be identified, clearly documented, and
agreed upon at the beginning of the project.
3. Iteration through the four activities is inevitable.

1.5.1 Usability goals

To recap, usability is generally regarded as ensuring that interactive products are easy to learn, effective
to use, and enjoyable from the user's perspective. It involves optimizing the interactions people have
with interactive products to enable them to carry out their activities at work, school, and in their
everyday life. More specifically, usability is broken down into the following goals:

 effective to use (effectiveness)

 efficient to use (efficiency)
 safe to use (safety)
 have good utility (utility)
 easy to learn (learnability)
 easy to remember how to use (memorability)

For each goal, we describe it in more detail and provide a key question.
Effectiveness is a very general goal and refers to how good a system is at doing what it is supposed to
do.

Question: Is the system capable of allowing people to learn well, carry out their work efficiently, access
the information they need, buy the goods they want, and so on?

Efficiency refers to the way a system supports users in carrying out their tasks.

Question: Once users have learned how to use a system to carry out their tasks, can they sustain a high
level of productivity?

Safety involves protecting the user from dangerous conditions and undesirable situations.

Question: Does the system prevent users from making serious errors and, if they do make an error, does
it permit them to recover easily?

Utility refers to the extent to which the system provides the right kind of functionality so that users can
do what they need or want to do.

Question: Does the system provide an appropriate set of functions that enable users to carry out all
their tasks in the way they want to do them?

Learnability refers to how easy a system is to learn to use. It is well known that people don't like
spending a long time learning how to use a system. A key concern is determining how much time users
are prepared to spend learning a system. There seems little point in developing a range of functionality
if the majority of users are unable or not prepared to spend time learning how to use it.

Question: How easy is it and how long does it take (i) to get started using a system to perform core tasks
and (ii) to learn the range of operations to perform a wider set of tasks?

Memorability refers to how easy a system is to remember how to use, once learned. If users haven't
used a system or an operation for a few months or longer, they should be able to remember or at least
rapidly be reminded how to use it.

1.5.2 User experience goals

 satisfying
 enjoyable
 fun
 entertaining
 helpful
 motivating
 aesthetically pleasing
 supportive of creativity
 rewarding
 emotionally fulfilling
The Design of Everyday Things.

Visibility The importance of visibility is exemplified by our two contrasting examples at the beginning of
the chapter.

Feedback Related to the concept of visibility is feedback.

Constraints The design concept of constraining refers to determining ways of restricting the kind of user
interaction that can take place at a given moment.

Mapping This refers to the relationship between controls and their effects in the world.

Consistency This refers to designing interfaces to have similar operations and use similar elements for
achieving similar tasks.

Affordance is a term used to refer to an attribute of an object that allows people to know how to use it.
At a very simple level, to afford means "to give a clue".

Below are the ten main usability principles, developed by Nielsen (2001) and his colleagues. Note how
some of them overlap with the design principles.

1. Visibility of system status-always keep users informed about what is going on, through providing
appropriate feedback within reasonable time
2. Match between system and the real world-speak the users' language, using words, phrases and
concepts familiar to the user, rather than systemoriented terms
 3. User control and freedom-provide ways of allowing users to easily escape from places they
unexpectedly find themselves, by using clearly marked 'emergency exits'
4. Consistency and standards-avoid making users wonder whether different words, situations, or
actions mean the same thing
5. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors-use plain language to describe the
nature of the problem and suggest a way of solving it
6. error prevention-where possible prevent errors occurring in the first place
7. Recognition rather than recall-make objects, actions, and options visible
8. Flexibility and efficiency of use-provide accelerators that are invisible to novice users, but allow
more experienced users to carry out tasks more quickly
9. Aesthetic and minimalist design-avoid using information that is irrelevant or rarely needed
10. Help and documentation-provide information that can be easily searched and provides help in a
set of concrete steps that can easily be followed

Key points

 Interaction design is concerned with designing interactive products to support people in their
everyday and working lives.
 Interaction design is multidisciplinary, involving many inputs from wide-reaching disciplines and
fields.
 Interaction design is now big business: many companies want it but don't know how to do it.
 Optimizing the interaction between users and interactive products requires taking into account
a number of interdependent factors, including context of use, type of task, and kind of user.
 Interactive products need to be designed to match usability goals like ease of use and learning.
 User experience goals are concerned with creating systems that enhance the user experience in
terms of making it enjoyable, fun, helpful, motivating, and pleasurable.
 Design and usability principles, like feedback and simplicity, are useful heuristics for analyzing
and evaluating aspects of an interactive product.