Course Title

Human Factors Engineering (2+1)

Department of Industrial Engineering & Management
Batch 2021F
Lecture – 07 and 08
Bad design and facts of bad design
(Ch. No. 06: What is Interaction Design, from –
Interaction design: beyond human-computer
interaction by
Jenny Preece, Yvonne Rogers, Helen Sharp)

1
What is interaction design?

• Designing interactive products to support people in their everyday and

working lives.
• It is a process:
• A goal-directed problem solving activity informed by intended use, target
domain, materials, cost, and feasibility
• A creative activity
• A decision-making activity to balance trade-offs

2
Basic activities in Interaction Design
There are four basic activities in Interaction Design:

1. Identifying needs and establishing requirements

2. Developing alternative designs

3. Building interactive versions of the designs

4. Evaluating designs

3
Key characteristics
• Three key characteristics permeate these four activities:

1. Focus on users early in the design and evaluation of the artefact

2. Identify, document and agree specific usability and user experience goals

3. Iteration is inevitable. Designers never get it right first time

4
Example of bad and good design
• Elevator controls and labels on the bottom row all look the same, so it is easy
to push a label by mistake instead of a control button

• People do not make same mistake for the labels and buttons on the top row.
Why not?

5
What to design
• Need to take into account:
• Who the users are
• What activities are being carried out
• Where the interaction is taking place

• Need to optimize the interactions users have with a product

• Such that they match the users activities and needs

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Understanding users’ needs
• Need to take into account what people are good and bad at

• Consider what might help people in the way they currently do things

• Listen to what people want and get them involved

• Use tried and tested user-based methods

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Who are the users / Stakeholders?

8
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
• Disabilities(e.g. sight, hearing, dexterity)

9
From HCI to Interaction Design
• Human-computer interaction(HCI) is:
• “Concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive
computing systems for human use and with the study of major phenomena
surrounding them”

• Interaction design (ID) is:

• “The design of spaces for human communication and interaction”

• Increasingly, more application areas, more technologies and more issues to consider
when designing ‘interfaces’
10
What are ‘needs’?
• Users rarely know what is possible
• Users can’t tell you what they ‘need’ to help them achieve their goals
• Instead, 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 (Imagination) tasks:
• Can be rooted in existing behaviour
• Can be described as future scenarios
11
Where do alternatives come from?

• Humans stick to what they know works

• But 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

12
Core characteristics of interaction design

• 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

13
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 check
regularly
• Safety: how safe?
• Utility: which functions are superfluous?
• Effectiveness: appropriate support? task coverage, information available
• Efficiency: performance measurements

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Testing prototypes to choose among alternatives

15
Usability goals
• Effective to use
• Efficient to use
• Safe to use
• Have good utility
• Easy to learn
• Easy to remember how to use

16
Design principles

• 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

17
Visibility
• 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!

18
Visibility
• 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

19
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?

20
Mapping
• Relationship between controls and their movements and the results in the world

• Why is this a poor mapping of control buttons?

21
Mapping
• Why is this a better mapping?

• The control buttons are mapped better onto the sequence of actions of fast rewind,
rewind, play and fast forward

22
Activity on mappings
• Which controls go with which rings (burners)?

23
Consistency
• 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

24
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

25
Usability principles
• Similar to design principles, except more prescriptive

• Used mainly as the basis for evaluating systems

• Provide a framework for heuristic evaluation

26
Usability principles
• Visibility of system status
• Match between system and the real world
• User control and freedom
• Consistency and standards
• Help users recognize, diagnose and recover from errors
• Error prevention
• Recognition rather than recall
• Flexibility and efficiency of use
• Aesthetic and minimalist design
• Help and documentation
27
Questions

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