Block 1

Question 1

The ID process involves 4 activities. What are they?

Answer 1

1. identifying needs and establishing requirements for the user experience
2. developing alternative designs that meet those requirements
3. building interactive versions of the design so that they can be communicated and assessed
4. evaluating what is being built throughout the process and the user experience it offers.

[Interaction Design 1.5]

Question 2

In addition to the four basic activities of design, what are another three key characteristics of the interaction design process?

Answer 2

1. Users should be involved throughout 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.

Source: Preece et al. (2002), p. 13

Question 3

What is the main definition of ID for the purposes of M364?

Answer 3

‘Designing interactive products to support the way people communicate and interact in their everyday and working lives’.

page 8 of the Set Book

Question 4

A central concern of interaction design is to develop interactive products that are usable. What is generally meant by ‘usable’ in this context?

Answer 4

By this is generally meant easy to learn, effective to use, and providing an enjoyable user experience.

[Interaction Design 1.2]

Question 5

Give four questions you need to answer in order to optimise user interaction with an interactive product.

Answer 5

1. Who is going to be using the interactive product?
2. How is it going to be used?
3. Where are they going to use it?
4. What activities will the user be doing when interacting with the product?

[Unit 1, Review Question 2]

Question 6

What are ‘design principles’, and what are they used for?

Answer 6

Design principles are generalizable abstractions intended to orient designers towards thinking about different aspects of their designs. They are used by interaction designers to aid their thinking when designing for the user experience. They are the dos and don’ts of interaction design.

(Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. 1.6.3)

More specifically, they are intended to help designers explain and improve their designs

(Thimbleby, 1990)

Question 7

Name 5 design principles.

Answer 7

Visibility
Feedback
Constraints
Consistency
Affordance

Question 8

Name the 6 usability goals

Answer 8

Effective to use (effectiveness)
Efficient to use (efficiency)
Safe to use (safety)
Having good utility (utility)
Easy to learn (learnability)
Easy to remember how to use (memorability).

[Interaction Design

Question 9

Which usability goal does the sentence below related to?

“Is it possible for the user to work out how to use the product by exploring the interface and trying out certain actions? How hard
will it be to learn the whole set of functions this way?”

Answer 9

Learnability

Question 10

Which usability goal does the sentence below related to?

“What is the range of errors that are possible using the product and what measures are there to permit users to recover easily from them?”

Answer 10

Safety

Question 11

Which usability goal does the sentence below related to?

“Is the product capable of allowing people to learn well, carry out their work efficiently, access the information they need, or buy the goods they want?”

Answer 11

Effectiveness

Question 12

Which usability goal does the sentence below related to?

“Does the product provide an appropriate set of functions that will enable users to carry out all their tasks in the way they want to do them?”

Answer 12

Utility

Question 13

Which usability goal does the sentence below related to?

“What kinds of interface support have been provided to help users remember how to carry out tasks, especially for products and operations they use infrequently?”

Answer 13

Memorability

Question 14

Which usability goal does the sentence below related to?

“Once users have learned how to use a system to carry out their tasks, can they sustain a high level of productivity?”

Answer 14

Efficiency

Question 15

which of the following is a design principle, and why?

(a) You must always put the Help menu at the left-hand end of the menu bar at the top of the screen.
(b) You should always provide clear feedback which indicates what action has been completed and what has been achieved.

Answer 15

(a) is not a design principle because it is very detailed and prescriptive, so rather than guiding your thinking it tells you precisely what to do. Such statements are usually referred to as design rules and you may find them in style guides such as those for computer operating systems such as Windows or Mac OS.
(b) is a design principle, because design principles are high-level informal rules or guidelines which you can use as a checklist when you are creating or evaluating a design. (b) satisfies this definition.

[Unit 1, Review Question 3]

Question 16

What is the ‘Mapping’ design principle concerned with?

Answer 16

Mapping concerns the relationship between controls and their effects in the world. Where there is a clear mapping between the control and its effect, the device should be easier to use.

Good mapping: up and down keyboard arrows used to represent the up and down movement of the cursor

Bad mapping: Start button on the Windows operating system, which does not actually start anything (instead it reveals a menu).

[Block 1, p. 61, 2.2]

Question 17

What is the ‘Visibility’ design principle concerned with?

Answer 17

Controls should be clearly visible, so users can see the controls that are available to them. Visual feedback should also be clearly visible, so users can understand what action has been done and what effect has been achieved, and hence what needs to be done next.

[Block 1, p. 61, 2.3]

Question 18

What is the ‘Feedback’ design principle concerned with?

How can it improve a product?

Answer 18

This is the information sent back to the user to confirm what action has been done and what result has been accomplished.

The better the feedback, the easier it is to perceive what is happening and hence interact with the device.

[Block 1, p. 61, 2.3]

Question 19

What is the ‘Constraints’ design principle concerned with?

How can it improve a product?

Answer 19

Constraints are ways of restricting the kind of interaction that can take place at a given moment.

Effective constraints can help guide users through the interaction, helping them to avoid errors.

[Block 1, p. 61, 2.3]

Question 20

What is the ‘Consistency’ design principle concerned with?

How can it improve a product?

Answer 20

This is where a user interface is designed to follow certain rules. There is both internal consistency (within the product) and external consistency (consistent with other products).

Consistency often helps make user interfaces easier to learn and user errors less likely.

[Block 1, p. 61, 2.3]

Question 21

What is the ‘Affordance’ design principle concerned with?

How can it improve a product?

Answer 21

Affordance is an aspect of a control that makes it obvious how to use it.

Good affordance helps improve usability.

[Block 1, p. 61, 2.3]

Question 22

List some features of the ID process

Answer 22

• a user-centred approach to development, where users’ concerns direct the development, rather than technical concerns
• balancing conflicting requirements
• generating several alternative designs
• communicating the design to others involved in the project
• evaluating alternative designs with users.

[Block 1, p. 75, review question 1]

Question 23

Give three reasons why user involvement can be useful.

Answer 23

• To ensure users’ activities and goals are taken into account
• Expectation management (the process of making sure that the users’ views and expectations of the product are realistic)
• To ensure ownership (users with a sense
  of ownership are more likely to be receptive to a product when it is completed).

[Block 1, p. 75, review question 2]

Question 24

List some issues that you need to consider when choosing the appropriate level of user involvement

Answer 24

• How many users do you want involved with the project?
• Do you want users to be major contributors to the project or just to give advice and guidance?
• Is consistency of user input important?
• How important is familiarity with the system?
• To what extent should involved users remain in touch on a daily or regular basis with the user group they represent?
• How many end users are there likely to be? (10s or 10,000s?)
• Do you know who the users are likely to be, or is the product aimed at the open market?
• How long is the project likely to be – for a short project, will it take too long to organise, manage and control the involvement?

[Block 1, p. 75, review question 3]

Question 25

A user-centred approach to development means that real users and their goals are the driving force behind the development of a product. What are the possible driving forces behind the development process if it is not user-centred?

Answer 25

Where the development is not user-centred, other forces will drive it, such as the characteristics of the technology or the preferences of other stakeholders (for example, managers and the software development team). For a project to be user-centred, whilst these are important, they should not be the main driving force.

[Unit 1, review question 4]

Question 26

Name five principles of user-centred development

Answer 26

1 Users’ tasks and goals are the driving force behind the development.

2 Users’ behaviour and context of use are studied and the system is designed to support them.

3 Users’ characteristics are captured and designed for.

4 Users are consulted throughout development from earliest phases to the latest, and their input is seriously taken into account.

5 All design decisions are taken within the context of the users, their work and their environment.

[p. 426 of the Set Book + Block 1, p. 76, review question 5]

Question 27

What are “stakeholders”?

Answer 27

Stakeholders are “people or organizations who will be affected by the system and who have a direct or indirect influence on the system requirements” (Kotonya and Sommerville, 1998)

Question 28

Name the four groups of stakeholders

Answer 28

1. Beneficiaries
2. Decision makers
3. Gatekeepers
4. Workers

[Block 1, unit 3, p. 81]

Question 29

In terms of stakeholders, what is the ID designers job?

Answer 29

The role of the interaction designer is to create a design that is acceptable within the particular context, taking into account the various stakeholder requirements and the power relationships between these groups.

[Block 1, unit 3, p. 83]

Question 30

What does the term ‘lifecycle model’ represent?

Answer 30

The term ‘lifecycle model’ is used to represent a model that captures a set of activities and how they are related

[set book 9.4]

Question 31

List a few life cycle models

Answer 31

Waterfall
Spiral
RAD (Rapid Application Development)
Agile

[set book 9.4.2]

Question 32

Name two key features of a RAD (Rapid Application Development)

Answer 32

Time-limited cycles of approximately six months, at the end of which a system or partial system must be delivered.

JAD (Joint Application Development) workshops in which users and developers come together to thrash out the requirements of the system.

[set book 9.4.2]

Question 33

What are the three main evaluation approaches?

Answer 33

1. Usability testing
2. Field studies
3. Analytical evaluation

[Set book 12.3.1]

Question 34

What are the main methods used in evaluation?

Answer 34

The main methods used in evaluation are:

Observing users.

Asking users their opinions.

Asking experts their opinions.

Testing users’ performance.

Modeling users’ task performance to predict the efficacy of a user interface.

[set book 12.3.3]

Question 35

ID has a lot of jargon, some of which has been adopted by industry in order to sell products. Some organisations use this jargon in a misleading way. Using Norman’s definition, what is a red flag?
Summarise the possible unfortunate implications of the red flags: ‘fool-proof’, ‘user-friendly’ and ‘intuitive’.
Suggest any other red flags you are aware of, possibly from products you have purchased.

Answer 35

[Unit 1, Review Question 3]

A red flag is a term that claims to indicate sensitivity to human needs but may in fact reflect a complete lack of understanding of people.
Some implications of red flags might be:
. ‘fool-proof’ – you think your customers are fools
. ‘user-friendly’ – the product holds users by the hand and forces them to do things one step at a time, in prescribed order, whether they like it or not
‘intuitive’ – ‘so automatic it is not conscious’, but almost everything we call intuitive, such as walking or using a pencil, took years of practice.

Question 36

What is ID, and what are the results of good ID?

Answer 36

[Unit 1, Review Question 4]

ID is surprisingly difficult to define. That is because it is a relatively new term and the meaning of such terms tends to evolve over time.
The main definition for the purposes of M364 is on page 8 of the Set Book, where it says ID is ‘designing interactive products to support the way people communicate and interact in their everyday and working lives’.
A secondary definition is given on page 0. This concentrates more on what ID aims to achieve: ‘it is about developing interactive products that are easy, effective and enjoyable to use’. Similarly, in Section 1.2 in this book, I state that ‘good ID encourages an easy, natural and engaging interaction between a user and a system’.
These are important definitions, which are central to the whole of M364.

Question 37

The ID process involves the following activities:

1 identifying needs and establishing requirements for the user experience

2 developing alternative designs that meet those requirements

3 building interactive versions of the design so that they can be communicated and assessed

4 evaluating what is being built throughout the process and the user experience it offers.

Why are activities 1 and 4 in this list important for the process of ID?

Answer 37

Activity 1.
Establishing requirements is essential when developing any product. However, for interaction design, it is essential to understand the needs and requirements of the people who will be using the product.
In particular, the characteristics of the users, how they will be using the product, the environment in which they will be using it, and the activities they will be using it for must all be taken into account. All these issues relate directly to the design of the interaction. Section 1.5 places a particular emphasis on understanding what the users do, and on the cultural differences between users.

Activity 4.
As Section 1.5 explains, evaluation is necessary to establish whether or not the product is usable. This is usually achieved by involving users in the evaluation process, as they are in the best position to establish the effectiveness of the design. The evaluation process also enables you to develop a fuller understanding of the users.

[Unit 1, Review Question 5]