Chapter 1

Dr. Mohammed Yassin

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1.1 Introduction
1.2 What Is Interaction Design?
1.3 The User Experience
1.4 Accessibility and Inclusiveness
1.5 Usability and User Experience Goals
1.6 Design principles
1.7 Visibility and and
Consistency
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Norman Door
1.1.1 Bad designs

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1.1.1 Bad designs
1.1.1 Bad designs
 Norman Door
A Norman Door is a door whose design tells the person to do the
opposite of what they're actually supposed to do.

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Norman Door
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a) What is wrong with the Apex remote?
b) Why is the TiVo remote much better designed than standard
remote controls?
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• Designing interactive products to support the
way people communicate and interact in their
everyday and working lives
– Sharp, Rogers and Preece (2007)

• The design of spaces for human

communication and interaction
– Winograd (1997)

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• 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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• 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 of these aspects:
– fundamental to all disciplines, fields, and approaches
concerned with researching and designing computer-
based systems for people

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• Academic disciplines contributing
to ID:
– Psychology
– Social Sciences
– Computing Sciences
– Engineering
– Ergonomics
– Informatics

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• Design practices contributing to
ID:
– Graphic design
– Product design
– Artist-design
– Industrial design
– Film industry

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• Interdisciplinary fields that ‘do’
interaction design:
– HCI
– Human Factors
– Cognitive Engineering
– Cognitive Ergonomics
– Computer Supported Co-operative Work
– Information Systems

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• Many people from different
backgrounds involved

• Different perspectives
and ways of seeing
and talking about things
• Benefits
– more ideas and designs
generated
• Disadvantages
– difficult to communicate and
progress forward the designs being create

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• How a product behaves and is used by
people in the real world
– the way people feel about it and their pleasure and
satisfaction when using it, looking at it, holding it,
and opening or closing it
– “every product that is used by someone has a user
experience: newspapers, ketchup bottles, reclining
armchairs, cardigan sweaters.” (Garrett, 2003)
• Cannot design a user experience, only
can design for a user experience

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•

•
• Users should be involved through the
development of the project
• Specific usability and user experience goals
need to be identified, clearly documented and
agreed at the beginning of the project
• Iteration is needed through the core activities

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• Help designers:
– understand how to design interactive
products that fit with what people want,
need and may desire
– appreciate that one size does not fit all
e.g., teenagers are very different to grown-ups
– identify any incorrect assumptions they may
have about particular user groups
e.g., not all old people want or need big fonts
– be aware of both people’s sensitivities and
their capabilities

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- Whether someone is disabled changes over time
with age, or recovery from an accident.

- The severity and impact of an impairment can vary

over the course of a day or in different environmental
conditions.

- Disabilities can result because technologies are

designed to necessitate a certain type of interaction
that is impossible for someone with an impairment.
• Disabilities can be classified as:
1. Sensory impairment (such as loss of vision or hearing)
2. Physical impairment (having loss of functions to one or more
parts of the body after a stroke or spinal cord injury)
3. Cognitive (including learning impairment or loss of
memory/cognitive function due to old age)
• Each type can be further defined in terms of capability:
• For example, someone might have only peripheral vision, be
color blind, or have no light perception
• Impairment can be categorized as:
4. Permanent (for instance, long-term wheelchair user)
5. Temporary (that is, after an accident or illness)
6. Situational (for example, a noisy environment means that a
person can't hear)
• 5/21/1960 versus 21/5/1960?
– Which should be used for international
services and online forms?

• Why is it that certain products, like the

iPod, are universally accepted by people
from all parts of the world whereas
websites are reacted to differently by
people from different cultures?

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• Designed to be
different for UK and US
customers
• What are the differences
and which is which?
• What should Anna’s
appearance be like
for other countries,
like India, South Africa,
or China?

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1) Effective to use
2) Efficient to use
3) Safe to use

4) Have good utility

5) Easy to learn

6) Easy to remember how to use

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 Desirable aspects
x
• Satisfying • Aesthetically Pleasing
• Enjoyable • Supportive Of Creativity
• Engaging • Supportive Of Creativity
• Pleasurable • Rewarding
• Exciting • Fun
• Entertaining • Provocative
• Helpful • Surprising
• Motivating • Enhancing Sociability
• Emotionally Fulfilling • Challenging
Undesirable Aspects
• Boring • Childish
• Frustrating • Unpleasant Patronizing
• Making One Feel Guilty • Making One Feel Stupid
• Annoying • Gimmicky
• Cutsey 37
• Selecting terms to convey a person’s feelings,
emotions, etc., can help designers understand
the multifaceted nature of the user experience

• How do usability goals differ from user

experience goals?
• Are there trade-offs between the two kinds of
goals?
– e.g. can a product be both fun and safe?

• How easy is it to measure usability versus

user experience goals?

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• Generalizable abstractions for thinking about
different aspects of design
• The do’s and don’ts of interaction design
• What to provide and what not to provide at
the interface
• Derived from a mix of theory-based
knowledge, experience and common-sense

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• This is a control panel for an elevator
• How does it work?
• Push a button for the floor you want?
• Nothing happens. Push any other button? Still
nothing. What do you need to do?
• It is not visible as to what to do!

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 …with this elevator, you need to insert your room card in the slot
by the buttons to get the elevator to work!

How would you make this action more visible?

• make the card reader more obvious

• provide an auditory message, that says what to do (which
language?)
• provide a big label next to the card reader that flashes
when someone enters

• make relevant parts visible

• make what has to be done obvious

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• Invisible automatic controls can make it
more difficult to use.

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• Sending information back to the user about
what has been done
• Includes sound, highlighting, animation and
combinations of these

– e.g. when screen button clicked on provides sound or

red highlight feedback:

“ccclichhk”

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• Restricting the possible actions that can be
performed
• Helps prevent user from selecting incorrect options

• Physical objects can be designed to constrain things

– e.g. there being only one way you can insert a key into a
lock

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 Logical or ambiguous design?
• Where do you plug the mouse?

• Where do you plug the keyboard?

• top or bottom connector?

• Do the color-coded icons help?

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How to design them more logically

(i) A provides direct adjacent mapping between

icon and connector

(ii) B provides color coding to associate the

connectors with the labels

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• Design interfaces to have similar operations
and use similar elements for similar tasks
• For example:
– always use ctrl key plus first initial of the command
for an operation – ctrl+C, ctrl+S, ctrl+O
• Main benefit is consistent interfaces are easier
to learn and use

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When consistency breaks down
• What happens if there is more than one
command starting with the same letter?
– e.g. save, spelling, select, style

• Have to find other initials or combinations

of keys, thereby breaking the consistency
rule
– e.g. ctrl+S, ctrl+Sp, ctrl+shift+L

• Increases learning burden on user, making

them more prone to errors

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 Internal and external
consistency
• Internal consistency refers to designing
operations to behave the same within an
application
– Difficult to achieve with complex interfaces
• External consistency refers to designing
operations, interfaces, etc., to be the
same across applications and devices
– Very rarely the case, based on different
designer’s preference

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 Keypad numbers layout

• A case of external inconsistency

(a) phones, remote controls (b) calculators, computer keypads

1 2 3 7 8 9
4 5 6 4 5 6
7 8 9 1 2 3
0 0

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• Refers to an attribute of an object that allows
people to know how to use it.
– e.g. a mouse button invites pushing, a door handle
affords pulling

• Norman (1988) used the term to discuss the

design of everyday objects
• Since has been much popularised in
interaction design to discuss how to design
interface objects
– e.g. scrollbars to afford moving up and down, icons
to afford clicking on

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 What does ‘affordance’ have
to offer interaction design?
• Interfaces are virtual and do not have affordances
like physical objects
• Norman argues it does not make sense to talk
about interfaces in terms of ‘real’ affordances
• Instead, interfaces are better conceptualized as
‘perceived’ affordances
– Learned conventions of arbitrary mappings between action and
effect at the interface
– Some mappings are better than others

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 Activity
– Virtual affordances
• How do the following screen objects afford?
• What if you were a novice user?
• Would you know what to do with them?

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 Key points
• Interaction design is concerned with designing interactive
products to support the way people communicate and
interact in their everyday and working lives
• It is concerned with how to create quality user
experiences
• It requires taking into account a number of
interdependent factors, including context of use, type of
activities, cultural differences, and user groups
• It is multidisciplinary, involving many inputs from wide-
reaching disciplines and fields

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