Chapter 2

THE PROCESS OF INTERACTION DESIGN

 Overview
• What is involved in Interaction Design?
– Understanding the problem space
– Importance of involving users
– Degrees of user involvement
– What is a user-centered approach?
– Four basic activities of interaction design
– A simple lifecycle model for interaction design
• Some practical issues
– Who are the users?
– What are the users’ needs?
– How to generate alternative designs
– How to choose among alternative designs
– How to integrate interaction design activities within other lifecycle models

www.id-book.com 2
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

www.id-book.com 3
 The double diamond of design

Source: Adapted from https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/design-process- what-

double-diamond
www.id-book.com 4
 Understanding the problem space
• Explore:
– What is currently the 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

www.id-book.com 5
 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 to acceptance and
success of product

www.id-book.com 6
 Degrees of user involvement
• Member of the design team
– Full time: constant input, but lose touch with users
– Part time: patchy input, and very stressful
– Short term: inconsistent across project life
– Long term: consistent, but lose touch with users
• Face-to-face group individual or activities
• Online contributions from thousands of users
– Online Feedback Exchange (OFE) systems
– Crowdsourcing design ideas
– Citizen science
• User involvement after product release

www.id-book.com 7
What is a user-centered approach?
User-centered approach is based on:
– Early focus on users and tasks: directly studying
cognitive, behavioral, anthropomorphic & attitudinal
characteristics
– Empirical measurement: users’ reactions and
performance to scenarios, manuals, simulations &
prototypes are observed, recorded and analysed
– Iterative design: when problems are found in user
testing, fix them and carry out more tests

www.id-book.com 8
Four basic activities of Interaction
Design
1. Discovering requirements
2. Designing alternatives
3. Prototyping alternative designs
4. Evaluating product and its user
experience throughout

www.id-book.com 9
A simple interaction design
lifecycle model
Exemplifies a user-centered design approach

www.id-book.com 10
 Another lifecycle model:
Google Design Sprints (Knapp et al, 2016)

Source: www.agilemarketing.net/google-design-sprints/ Used courtesy of Agile

Marketing

www.id-book.com 11
 Another lifecycle model:
Research in the Wild (Rogers and Marshall, 2017)

A framework for research in the wild studies

Source: Rogers and Marshall, 2017, p6. Used courtesy of Morgan & Claypool
www.id-book.com 12
 Some practical issues
• Who are the users?
• What are the users’ needs?
• How to generate alternative designs
• How to choose among alternatives
• How to integrate interaction design
activities with other lifecycle models

www.id-book.com 13
Who are the users/stakeholders?
• Not obvious:
– 382 distinct types of users for smartphone apps (Sha Zhao et al,
2016)
– Many products are intended for use by large sections of the
population, so user is “everybody”
– More targeted products are associated with specific roles
• Stakeholders
– Larger than the group of direct users
– Identifying stakeholders helps identify groups to include in
interaction design activities

www.id-book.com 14
 What are the users’ needs?
• Users rarely know what is possible
• Instead:
– Explore the problem space
– Investigate who are the users
– Investigate user activities to see what can be improved
– Try out ideas with potential users

• Focus on peoples’ goals, usability and user experience

goals rather than expect stakeholders to articulate
requirements

www.id-book.com 15
 How to generate alternatives
• 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-fertilisation of ideas from different perspectives
– Users can generate different designs
– Product evolution based on changing use
– Seek inspiration: similar products and domain, or
different products and domain
• Balancing constraints and trade-offs
www.id-book.com 16
How to choose among alternatives
• Interaction design focuses on externally visible and
measurable behaviour
• Technical feasibility
• Evaluation with users or with peers
– Prototypes not static documentation because behaviour 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

www.id-book.com 17
How to integrate interaction design
activities within other models
• Integrating interaction design activities in lifecycle
models from other disciplines needs careful planning
• Software development lifecycle models are prominent
• Integrating with agile software development is
promising because
– it incorporates tight iterations
– it champions early and regular feedback
– it handles emergent requirements
– it aims to strike a balance between flexibility and structure

www.id-book.com 18
 Some key points
• Four basic activities in interaction design
process
– Discovering requirements
– Designing alternatives
– Prototyping
– Evaluating
• User-centered design rests on three principles
– Early focus on users and tasks
– Empirical measurement using quantifiable &
measurable usability criteria
– Iterative design
www.id-book.com 19