Lesson01

Interaction design
• Introduction
• Good and Poor Design
• What is Interaction Design?
• The User Experience - Understanding Users

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1. Introduction
•How many interactive products are there in everyday
use? Think for a minute about what you use in a typical
day: smartphone, tablet, computer, remote control,
coffee machine, ATM, ticket machine, printer, iPod, GPS,
e-reader, TV, electric toothbrush, radio, games console . .
. the list is endless. Now think for a minute about how
usable they are. How many are actually easy, effortless,
and enjoyable to use? Some, like the iPod, are a joy to
use. Others, like a ticket machine, can be very
frustrating. Why is there a difference?

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• Many products that require users to interact with them,
such as smartphones and social networking sites, have
been designed primarily with the user in mind. They
are generally easy and enjoyable to use. Others, such
as switching from viewing a rented movie on your
smart TV to watching a sports channel, or setting the
alarm on a digital clock, have not necessarily been
designed with the users in mind, but have been
engineered primarily as systems to perform set
functions. While they may work effectively, it can be at
the expense of how they will be used by real people.

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• One main aim of interaction design is to reduce the
negative aspects (e.g. frustration, annoyance) of the
user experience while enhancing the positive ones
(e.g. enjoyment, engagement). In essence, it is about
developing interactive products 1 that are easy,
effective, and pleasurable to use – from the users’
perspective. In this chapter we begin by examining
what interaction design is. We look at the difference
between good and poor design, highlighting how
products can differ radically in how usable and
enjoyable they are. We then describe what and who is
involved in the process of interaction design.
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• The user experience, which is a central concern of
interaction design, is then introduced. Finally, we
outline how to characterize the user experience in
terms of usability goals, user experience goals, and
design principles. An assignment is presented at the
end of the chapter in which you have the opportunity
to put into practice what you have read by evaluating
the design of an interactive product

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2. Good and Poor Design
A central concern of interaction design is to develop interactive
products that are usable. By this is generally meant easy to learn,
effective to use, and providing an enjoyable user experience. A
good place to start thinking about how to design usable
interactive products is to compare examples of welland poorly-
designed ones. Through identifying the specific weaknesses and
strengths of different interactive products, we can begin to
understand what it means for something to be usable or not. Here,
we describe two examples of poorly designed products – a voice
mail system used in hotels and the ubiquitous remote control
device – and contrast these with two well-designed examples of
products that perform the same function.

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3. What Is Interaction Design?
•The Components of Interaction Design
We view interaction design as fundamental to all
disciplines, fields, and approaches that are concerned
with researching and designing computer based systems
for people. Why are there so many and what do they all
do? Furthermore, how do the various disciplines, fields,
and design approaches differ from one another? ponents
of Interaction Design

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• The Components of Interaction Design

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We have already described the distinction between
interaction design and software engineering. The differences
between interaction design and the other approaches
referred to in the figure are largely down to which methods,
philosophies, and lenses they use to study, analyze, and
design computers. Another way they vary is in terms of the
scope and problems they address. For example, Information
Systems is concerned with the application of computing
technology in domains like business, health, and education,
whereas Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is
concerned with the need also to support multiple people
working together using computer systems (Greif, 1988)
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• Who Is Involved in Interaction Design?
From Figure 1.4 it can also be seen that many people are
involved, ranging from social scientists to movie-makers.
This is not surprising given that technology has become
such a pervasive part of our lives. But it can all seem rather
bewildering to the onlooker. How does the mix of players
work together?
Designers need to know many different things about users,
technologies, and interactions between them in order to
create effective user experiences. At the very least, they
need to understand how people act and react to events
and how they communicate and interact with each other.
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To be able to create engaging user experiences, they
also need to understand how emotions work, what is
meant by aesthetics, desirability, and the role of
narrative in human experience. Developers also need to
understand the business side, the technical side, the
manufacturing side, and the marketing side. Clearly, it is
difficult for one person to be well versed in all of these
diverse areas and also know how to apply the different
forms of knowledge to the process of interaction design.

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Interaction design is mostly carried out by
multidisciplinary teams, where the skill sets of engineers,
designers, programmers, psychologists, anthropologists,
sociologists, artists, toy makers, and others are drawn
upon. It is rarely the case, however, that a design team
would have all of these professionals working together.
Who to include in a team will depend on a number of
factors, including a company's design philosophy, its
size, purpose, and product line.

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One of the benefits of bringing together people with different
backgrounds and training is the potential of many more ideas
being generated, new methods developed, and more creative
and original designs being produced. However, the downside is
the costs involved. The more people there are with different
backgrounds in a design team, the more difficult it can be to
communicate and make progress forward with the designs being
generated. Why? People with different backgrounds have
different perspectives and ways of seeing and talking about the
world. What one person values as important others may not
even see (Kim, 1990). Similarly, a computer scientist's
understanding of the term ‘representation’ is often very different
from a graphic designer's or a psychologist's.

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What this means in practice is that confusion,
misunderstanding, and communication breakdowns can
surface in a team. The various team members may have
different ways of talking about design and may use the same
terms to mean quite different things. Other problems can
arise when a group of people who have not previously
worked as a team is thrown together. For example, Philips
found that its multidisciplinary teams that were responsible
for developing ideas and products for the future experienced
a number of difficulties, namely that project team members
did not always have a clear idea of who needed what
information, when, and in what form (Lambourne et al, 1997)

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4. The User Experience
The user experience (UX) is central to interaction design. By
this it is meant how a product behaves and is used by people
in the real world. Nielsen and Norman (2014) define it as
encompassing “all aspects of the end-user's interaction with
the company, its services, and its products.” As stressed by
Garrett (2010, p. 10), “every product that is used by
someone has a user experience: newspapers, ketchup
bottles, reclining armchairs, cardigan sweaters.” More
specifically, it is about how people feel about a product and
their pleasure and satisfaction when using it, looking at it,
holding it, and opening or closing it.
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• The User Experience
It includes their overall impression of how good it is to use,
right down to the sensual effect small details have on
them, such as how smoothly a switch rotates or the sound
of a click and the touch of a button when pressing it. An
important aspect is the quality of the experience someone
has, be it a quick one, such as topping up a cell phone, a
leisurely one, such as playing with an interactive toy, or
an integrated one, such as visiting a museum (Law et al,
2009).

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• It is important to point out that one cannot design a user
experience, only design for a user experience. In
particular, one cannot design a sensual experience, but
only create the design features that can evoke it. For
example, the outside case of a cell phone can be designed
to be smooth,silky, and fit in the palm of a hand; when
held, touched, looked at, and interacted with, that can
provoke a sensual and satisfying user experience.
Conversely, if it is designed to be heavy and awkward to
hold, it is much more likely to end up providing a poor
user experience, one that is uncomfortable and
unpleasant.

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• Designers sometimes refer to UX as UXD. The addition
of the D to UX is meant to encourage design thinking
that focuses on the quality of the user experience
rather than on the set of design methods to use
(Allanwood and Beare, 2014). As Norman (2004) has
stressed for many years, “It is not enough that we
build products that function, that are understandable
and usable, we also need to build joy and excitement,
pleasure and fun, and yes, beauty to people's lives.

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• There are many aspects of the user experience that can be
considered and ways of taking them into account when
designing interactive products. Of central importance are the
usability, the functionality, the aesthetics, the content, the
look and feel, and the sensual and emotional appeal. In
addition, Carroll (2004) stresses other wide-reaching aspects,
including fun, health, social capital (the social resources that
develop and are maintained through social networks, shared
values, goals, and norms), and cultural identity, e.g. age,
ethnicity, race, disability, family status, occupation, education.
At a more subjective level, McCarthy and Wright (2004)
discuss the importance of people's expectations and the way
they make sense of their experiences when using technology
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• How realistic is it for interaction designers to take all of
these factors (and potentially many others) into account
and, moreover, be able to translate andcombine them to
produce quality user experiences? Put frankly, there is no
magic formula to help them. As of yet, there isn't a unifying
theory or framework that can be readily applied by
interaction designers. However, there are numerous
conceptual frameworks, tried and tested design methods,
guidelines, and many relevant research findings – these are
described throughout the book. Here, we begin by outlining
the process and goals of interaction design.

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• More generally, McCarthy and Wright's (2004) Technology as
Experience framework accounts for the user experience largely in
terms of how it is felt by the user. They recognize that defining
experience is incredibly difficult because it is so nebulous and ever-
present to us, just as swimming in water is to a fish. Nevertheless,
they have tried to capture the essence of human experience by
describing it in both holistic and metaphorical terms. These comprise
a balance of sensual, cerebral, and emotional threads. Their
framework draws heavily from the philosophical writings of Dewey
and Pragmatism, which focus on the sense-making aspects of human
experience. As Dewey (1934) points out: “Emotion is the moving and
cementing force. It selects what is congruous and dyes what is
selected with its color, thereby giving qualitative unity to materials
externally disparate and dissimilar. It thus provides unity in and
through the varied parts of experience.
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McCarthy and Wright propose four core threads that make up
our holistic experiences: sensual, emotional, compositional, and
spatio-temporal:
•The sensual thread. This is concerned with our sensory
engagement with a situation and is similar to the visceral
level of Norman's model. It can be equated with the level
of absorption people have with various technological
devices and applications, most notable being computer
games, smartphones, and chat rooms, where users can be
highly absorbed in their interactions at a sensory level.
These can involve thrill, fear, pain, and comfort.

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• The emotional thread. Common examples of emotions
that spring to mind are sorrow, anger, joy, and
happiness. In addition, the framework points out how
emotions are intertwined with the situation in which
they arise – e.g. a person becomes angry with a
computer because it does not work properly. Emotions
also involve making judgments of value. For example,
when purchasing a new cell phone, people may be
drawn to the ones that are most cool-looking but be in
an emotional turmoil because they are the most
expensive. They can't really afford them but they really
would like one of them.
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• The compositional thread. This is concerned with the
narrative part of anexperience, as it unfolds, and the
way a person makes sense of it. For example, when
shopping online, the options laid out to people can lead
them in a coherent way to making a desired purchase
or they can lead to frustrating experiences resulting in
no purchase being made. When in this situation,
people ask themselves questions such as: What is this
about? Where am I? What has happened? What is
going to happen next? What would happen if . . . ? The
compositional thread is the internal thinking we do
during our experiences.
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• The spatio-temporal thread. This refers to the space
and time in which our experiences take place and their
effect upon those experiences. There are many ways of
thinking about space and time and their relationship
with one another: for example, we talk of time
speeding up, standing still, and slowing down, while we
talk of space in terms of public and personal places,
and needing one's own space.

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The threads are meant as ideas to help designers think and
talk more clearly and concretely about the relationship
between technology and experience. By describing an
experience in terms of its interconnected aspects, the
framework can aid thinking about the whole experience of a
technology rather than as fragmented aspects, e.g. its
usability, its marketability, or its utility. For example, when
buying clothes online, the framework can be used to capture
the whole gamut of experiences, including: the fear or joy of
needing to buy a new outfit; the time and place where it can be
purchased, e.g. online stores or shopping mall; the tensions of
how to engage with the vendor, e.g. the pushy sales assistant
or an anonymous website
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the value judgment involved in contemplating the cost and
how much one is prepared to spend; the internal
monologue that goes on where questions are asked such
as will it look good on me, what size should I buy, do I have
shoes to match, do I need to try it on, how easy will it be to
wash, will I need to iron it each time, and how often will I
be able to wear it? All of these aspects can be described in
terms of the four threads and in so doing highlight which
aspects are more important for a given product. For
example, if you were to do this exercise when buying a
new car versus a domestic energy-saving device, you
would find you would get quite different descriptions
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