TOPIC 3:

INTERA CT IVE D ES I G N
INTERACTION DESIGN
•Designing interactive products to support the way
people communicate and interact in their everyday and
working lives.
•It is about creating user experiences that enhance and
augment the way people work, communicate, and
interact.
•Designing spaces for human communication and
interaction.
INTERACTION DESIGN
•By interaction design, we mean designing interactive
products to support people in their everyday and
working lives.
•In particular, it is about creating user experiences that
enhance and extend the way people work,
communicate and interact. It was described as the
design of spaces for human communication and
interaction (Winograd, 1997). In this sense, it is about
finding ways of supporting people.
IS INTERACTION DESIGN BEYOND HCI?
•Interaction Design is concerned with the theory,
research, and practice of designing user experiences for
all manner of technologies, systems, and products.
While Human Computer Interaction is concerned with
the design, evaluation, and implementation of
interactive computing systems for human use and with
the study of major phenomena surrounding them.
WHO IS INVOLVED IN INTERACTION
DESIGN?
•Designers
They should know many different things about users,
technologies, and interactions between them
They need to understand how people act and react to
events.
How they communicate and interact with each other
Create engaging user experiences
Understand how emotions work, what is meant by
aesthetics, desirability, and the role of narrative in human
experience.
WHO IS INVOLVED IN INTERACTION
DESIGN?
•Developers
Understand the business side, the technical side, the
manufacturing side, and the marketing side.

•User Experience (ux)

Central to interaction design
How a product behaves and is used by people in the real
world
How people feel about a product and their pleasure and
satisfaction when using it, looking at it, holding it, and
opening or closing it.
WHO IS INVOLVED IN INTERACTION
DESIGN?
•Professionals do in the interaction design 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
THE PROCESS OF INTERACTION DESIGN
•Essentially,the process of interaction design involves
four basic activities:
1. Identifying needs and establishing requirements. In
order to design something to support people, we must
know who our target users are and what kind of
support an interactive product could usefully provide.
These needs form the basis of the product's
requirements and underpin subsequent design and
development.
THE PROCESS OF INTERACTION DESIGN
2.Developing alternative designs that meet those
requirements. This is the core activity of designing,
actually suggesting ideas for meeting the
requirements. This activity can be broken up into two
sub-activities:
• Conceptual design involves producing the conceptual
model for the product, and a conceptual model describes
what the product should do, behave and look like.
• Physical design considers the detail of the product
including the colors, sounds, and images to use, menu
design, and icon design.
THE PROCESS OF INTERACTION DESIGN
3.Building interactive versions of the designs so that
they can be communicated and assessed.
Interaction design involves designing interactive
products. The most sensible way for users to evaluate
such designs, then, is to interact with them. This
requires an interactive version of the designs to be
built, but that does not mean that a software version
is required. There are different techniques for
achieving "interaction," not all of which require a
working piece of software.
THE PROCESS OF INTERACTION DESIGN
4.Evaluating what is being built throughout the
process. Evaluation is the process of determining the
usability and acceptability of the product or design
that is measured in terms of a variety of criteria
including the number of errors users make using it,
how appealing it is, how well it matches the
requirements, and so on. Interaction design requires
a high level of user involvement throughout
development, and this enhances the chances of an
acceptable product being delivered.
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.
INTERACTION DESIGN MODEL
THE GOALS OF INTERACTION DESIGN
Usability goals
• 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.
oEffectiveness is a very general goal and refers to how good a system is at
doing what it is supposed to do.
oEfficiency refers to the way a system supports users in carrying out their
tasks.
oSafety involves protecting the user from dangerous conditions and
undesirable situations.
oUtility 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.
THE GOALS OF INTERACTION DESIGN
oLearnability refers to how easy a system is to learn to use.
oMemorability refers to how easy a system is to remember how to use,
once learned.

User experience goals

• Interaction design is increasingly concerning itself with creating
systems that are:

osatisfying omotivating
oenjoyable oaesthetically pleasing
ofun osupportive of creativity
oentertaining orewarding
ohelpful oemotionally fulfilling
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
• Visibility
The more visible functions are, the more likely users will be
able to know what to do next. In contrast, when functions are
"out of sight," it makes them more difficult to find and know
how to use.
• Feedback
The related to the concept of visibility is feedback. Feedback
is about sending back information about what action has been
done and what has been accomplished, allowing the person to
continue with the activity. Using feedback in the right way can
also provide the necessary visibility for user interaction.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
• 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. One of the advantages of this form of constraining is it
prevents the user from selecting incorrect options and thereby
reduces the chance of making a mistake. It is classified into 3
categories:
Physical constraints refer to the way physical objects restrict the
movement of things.
Logical constraints rely on people's understanding of the way the
world works.
Cultural constraints rely on learned conventions, like the use of red
for warning, the use of certain kinds of audio signals for danger, and
the use of the smiley face to represent happy emotions.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
• 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. In
particular, a consistent interface is one that follows rules, such
as using the same operation to select all objects.  
Good example of external consistency is the user interface of
adobe products. Once you know photoshop it is much easier to
reuse the same knowledge to start using illustrator and so on.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
•Affordance
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". When the
affordances of a physical object are perceptually obvious
it is easy to know how to interact with it.
HEURISTICS AND USABILITY PRINCIPLES
When design principles are used in practice they are commonly
referred to as heuristics. This term emphasizes that something has
to be done with them when they are applied to a given problem. In
particular, they need to be interpreted in the design context,
drawing on past experience of, for example, how to design
feedback and what it means for something to be consistent.
Another form of guidance is usability principles. These are
quite similar to design principles, except that they tend to be more
prescriptive. In addition, whereas design principles tend to be used
mainly for informing a design, usability principles are used mostly
as the basis for evaluating prototypes and existing systems. In
particular, they provide the framework for heuristic evaluation.
HEURISTICS AND USABILITY PRINCIPLES
Ten main usability 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 system oriented 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.
HEURISTICS AND USABILITY PRINCIPLES
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.
END OF PRESENTATION