1.1 Interaction Design Flashcards
What are heuristics?
Recognized usability principles based on years of data and refinement
What are the rules to help users understand what’s going on?
Rule #1: Consistency
Rule #2: Familiar metaphors and language
Rule #3: Clean and functional design
What do familiar metaphors and language mean in interaction design?
The system should speak the users’ language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms.
Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in natural and logical order.
“If you’re creating something unfamiliar, base it in the familiar.”
What is a clean and functional design?
Add only as many elements as are absolutely needed to get the point across and have users accomplish their goals.
“Your layout should be driven by what people want to do.”
How can you produce a clean and functional design?
Your layout should be driven by what people want to do.
• Above the fold
• Signal to noise ratio
• Remove unnecessary functionality
What does above the fold mean?
Place the most important things closest to the top of the page.
What are the 3 things to help users understand what’s going on?
- Freedom (Always give people the feeling of control)
- Flexibility (Flexible shortcuts for experts, Smart defaults, Proactivity, and Recommendations)
- Recognition over recall
What are smart defaults?
Emphasize or perform automatically- the next action the user is most likely to take.
What are the four ways to give appropriate feedback?
- Show status
- Error prevention
- Support error recovery
- Provide help
Sorry made an Error need SuPport
If the page takes longer than 5 seconds, show a _____ ___.
Progress bar
What is error recovery?
Make the problem clear and provide a path forward.
When a user lands on your page, you want to provide users to do something. What are some ways to provide invitations?
- Avoid blank slates
- Make explicit calls to action
- Give people something to do
Why are hard cuts difficult to understand state changes?
Because changing the entire page means you have to rescan the entire thing to see what changed
What are stakeholders?
A stakeholder is someone who has a stake in the project, and those are typically executives, manager, people from development, sales, product management, and support.
People that are in some way or another related to the project.
What does SME stand for?
Subject Matter Expert
Who are the Subject Matter Experts?
Authorities on the space in which the product will operate.
• Very useful when working in highly technical domains like healthcare, finance, or science.
What is contextual inquiry?
Watching & asking the user while in their natural environment
What are personas?
Fictitious, yet realistic & detailed descriptions of the users of your product.
What is included in a persona?
- A name and photo
- Demographic information
- Goals and needs
- Preferences
- …and whatever else is important
What is a scenario?
Description of how a persona accomplished a goal.
• Scenarios are written stories - imagine yourself in the shoes of your persona, trying to accomplish something.
What do you create based on scenarios?
- Requirements (what data, functionality, and context needs to be considered)
- Interaction Framework (form factor, input methods, functional groups, hierarchy)
What is a wireframe?
A low fidelity prototype:
• Basically more detailed sketches, done on a computer
• Gives an overall sense of the layout of each page and how the page works
• Typically annotated to describe interaction detail
Why are wireframes useful for designers?
- For drafting design concepts in more detail than sketches
- For refining/ fleshing out UI details like navigation and interactions
- To print for paper prototyping
- To get the team on the same page
- To use for managing/maintaining the design over time
