Chapter 2

THE PROCESS OF INTERACTION DESIGN

 Overview
What is involved in Interaction Design?
• Who to involve in the design process
• Importance of involving users
• Degrees of user involvement
• What is a people-centered approach?
• Four basic activities of interaction design
• A simple lifecycle model for interaction design
Some practical issues
• How to find out what people need
• How to decide what to design
• How to generate alternative designs
• How to choose among alternative designs
• How to integrate interaction design activities within other lifecycle models

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What is involved in Interaction Design?

• It is a process:
 Focused on discovering requirements, designing to fulfil
requirements, producing prototypes and evaluating them
 Focused on users and their goals
 Involves trade-offs to balance conflicting requirements
• Generating alternatives and choosing between them
is key
• Four approaches: user-centered design, activity-
centered design, systems design, and genius design

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 The double diamond of design

Source: Adapted from www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/what-framework-innovation-design-councils-evolved-double-diamond

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Who to involve in interaction design
Identify stakeholders for the product
• Individuals or groups who influence or are influenced
by the success or failure of the project
• Users are not the only stakeholders
• Direct and indirect users, developers, executives,
legislators

Involving stakeholders is not always easy

• May not need to involve all groups
• Knowing the stakeholder groups is only the first step!

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 Importance of involving users
Expectation management
• Realistic expectations
• No surprises, no disappointments
• Timely training
• Communication, but no hype

Ownership
• Make the users active stakeholders
• More likely to forgive or accept problems
• Can make a big difference in acceptance and success
of product

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 Degrees of user involvement
• Member of the design team
• Small group or individual activities
• Online contributions from thousands of users
 Online Feedback Exchange (OFE) systems
 Crowdsourcing design ideas
 Citizen engagement
• Participatory design
• User involvement after product release
 A/B testing
 Customer reviews

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What is a people-centered approach?
Three principles for “useful & easy-to-use” products
• Early focus on users and tasks
• Empirical measurement
• Iterative design
Expanded to include
• People’s tasks and goals drive development
• People’s behaviour and context is studied
• People’s characteristics are designed for
• Stakeholders are consulted throughout
• Design decisions are taken in this context
• Specific usability and user experience goals
• Iteration through all interaction design activities
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 Four basic activities of
Interaction Design
1. Discovering requirements
2. Designing alternatives
3. Prototyping alternative designs
4. Evaluating product and its user
experience throughout

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A simple interaction design
lifecycle model
Exemplifies a people-centered design approach

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 Some practical issues
• How to find out what people need
• How to decide what to design
• How to generate alternative designs
• How to choose among alternatives
• How to integrate interaction design
activities with other lifecycle models

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 How to find out what people need
• Users rarely know what is possible
• Instead:
 Explore the problem space
 Investigate potential users and their activities
 Try out ideas with potential users
• Focus on peoples’ goals, usability, and user
experience goals, rather than expect stakeholders
to articulate requirements

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 How to decide what to design
Explore
• What is the current user experience?
• Why is a change needed?
• How will this change improve the situation?

Articulating the problem space

• Team effort
• Explore different perspectives
• Avoid incorrect assumptions and unsupported claims

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How to generate alternative designs
• Humans tend to stick with something that works
• Considering alternatives helps identify better designs
• Where do alternative designs come from?
 ‘Flair and creativity’: research and synthesis
 Cross-fertilization of ideas from different perspectives
 Users can generate different designs
 Prompts to provoke thinking, e.g. SCAMPER
 Seek inspiration: other products and domain
 Different perspectives
• Balancing constraints and trade-offs
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How to choose among alternatives
• Interaction design focuses on externally-visible and
measurable behavior
• Technical feasibility
• Evaluation with users or peers
 Prototypes not static documentation because behavior is key
• A/B Testing
 Online method to inform choice between alternatives
 Nontrivial to set appropriate metrics and choose user group sets

• Quality thresholds
 Different stakeholder groups have different quality thresholds
 Usability and user experience goals lead to relevant criteria

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How to integrate interaction design
activities within other models
• Integrating interaction design activities in lifecycle
models from other disciplines requires careful planning
• Software development lifecycle models are prominent
• Integrating with agile software development:
 It incorporates tight iterations
 It champions early and regular feedback
 It handles emergent requirements
 It aims to strike a balance between flexibility and structure

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 Some key points
• Four basic activities in interaction design process
 Discovering requirements
 Designing alternatives
 Prototyping
 Evaluating
• People-centered design rests on three principles
 Early focus on users and tasks
 Empirical measurement
 Iterative design
• Understand problem space before starting design
• Involve stakeholder groups throughout development
• Generate alternative designs and evaluate them
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