Chapter 3

Understanding and Conceptualizing

Interaction
 Introduction
• Imagine you have been asked to design an application to enable
people to share their photos, movies, music, chats, documents,
and so on in an efficient, safe, and enjoyable way. What would
you do?
• How would you start? Would you begin by sketching out how
the interface might look, workout how the system architecture
should be structured, or start coding?
• Or, would you start by asking users about their current
experiences of sharing files and look at existing tools, e.g.
Dropbox, and, based on this, begin thinking about why and how
you were going to design the application?
 Understanding the Problem Space and
Conceptualizing Interaction
Having a good understanding of the problem space greatly helps
design teams to then be able to conceptualize the design space.

• Orientation – enabling the design team to ask specific kinds of

questions about how the conceptual model will be understood by
the targeted users.
• Open-mindedness – preventing the design team from becoming
narrowly focused early on.
• Common ground – allowing the design team to establish a set of
common terms that all can understand and agree upon, reducing
the chance of misunderstandings and confusion arising later on.
 Conceptual Models
• It is an abstraction outlining what people can do with a product
and what concepts are needed to understand how to interact
with it.

• A key benefit of conceptualizing a design at this level is that it

enables “designers to straighten out their thinking before they
start laying out their widgets”
 Interface Metaphors
• Metaphors are considered to be a central component of a
conceptual model.
• They provide a structure that is similar in some way to aspects of
a familiar entity (or entities) but also have their own behaviors
and properties.
• Example, the desktop metaphor and search engine.
• This term was originally coined in the early 1990s to refer to a
software tool that indexed and retrieved files remotely from the
Internet, using various algorithms to match terms selected by
the user.
 Interaction Types
• Another way of conceptualizing the design space is in terms of
the interaction types that will underlie the user experience.
Essentially, these are the ways a person interacts with a product
or application.

• Four main types: instructing, conversing, manipulating, and

exploring.
 Interaction Types
1. Instructing – where users issue instructions to a system. This
can be done in a number of ways, including: typing in commands,
selecting options from menus in a windows environment or on a
multitouch screen, speaking aloud commands, gesturing, pressing
buttons, or using a combination of function keys.
2. Conversing – where users have a dialog with a system. Users
can speak via an interface or type in questions to which the
system replies via text or speech output.
3. Manipulating – where users interact with objects in a virtual or
physical space by manipulating them (e.g. opening, holding,
closing, placing).
4. Exploring – where users move through a virtual environment or
a physical space. Virtual environments include 3D worlds, and
augmented and virtual reality systems.
 Instructing
• This type of interaction describes how users carry out their
tasks by telling the system what to do. Examples include giving
instructions to a system to perform operations such as tell the
time, print a file, and remind the user of an appointment.
• A diverse range of products has been designed based on this
model, including home entertainment systems, consumer
electronics, and computers.
• The way in which the user issues instructions can vary from
pressing buttons to typing in strings of characters. Many
activities are readily supported by giving instructions.
Instructing
• In Windows and other GUI-based systems, control keys or
the selection of menu options via a mouse, touch pad, or
touch screen are used. Typically, a wide range of functions
are provided from which users have to select when they
want to do something to the object on which they are
working.
• For example, a user writing a report using a word processor
will want to format the document, count the number of
words typed, and check the spelling. The user instructs the
system to do these operations by issuing appropriate
commands.
Conversing
• This form of interaction is based on the idea of a person
having a conversation with a system, where the system acts
as a dialog partner. In particular, the system is designed to
respond in a way another human being might when having a
conversation. It differs from the activity of instructing insofar
as it encompasses a two-way communication process, with
the system acting like a partner rather than a machine that
obeys orders. It has been most commonly used for
applications where the user needs to find out specific kinds
of information or wants to discuss issues.
• Examples include advisory systems, help facilities, and search
engines.
Conversing
• The kinds of conversation that are currently supported
range from simple voice-recognition, menu-driven systems
that are interacted with via phones, to more complex
natural language-based systems that involve the system
parsing and responding to queries typed in by the user.
• Examples of the former include banking, ticket booking,
and train-time inquiries, where the user talks to the system
in single-word phrases and numbers – e.g. yes, no, three –
in response to prompts from the system.
Figure: Siri's response to the question “Do I need
an umbrella?
 Manipulating
• This form of interaction involves manipulating objects and
capitalizes on users’ knowledge of how they do so in the physical
world. For example, digital objects can be manipulated by
moving, selecting, opening, and closing. Extensions to these
actions include zooming in and out, stretching, and shrinking –
actions that are not possible with objects in the real world.
Exploring
• This mode of interaction involves users moving through
virtual or physical environments. For example, users can
explore aspects of a virtual 3D environment, such as the
interior of a building. Physical environments can also be
embedded with sensing technologies that, when they
detect the presence of someone or certain body
movements, respond by triggering certain digital or
physical events.
• The basic idea is to enable people to explore and interact
with an environment, be it physical or digital, by exploiting
their knowledge of how they move and navigate through
existing spaces.
 Assignment/Activity
• Go to a few online stores and see how the interface has been
designed to enable the customer to order and pay for an item.
How many use the ‘add to shopping cart/trolley/basket’
followed by the ‘checkout’ metaphor? Does this make it
straightforward and intuitive to make a purchase.
• Compare the following: a paperback book and an ebook; a
paper-based map and a smartphone map. How do they
differ? What is the new functionality? What are the pros and
cons?