Block 1 - Overall Interaction Design Flashcards
Give four questions you need to answer in order to optimise user interaction with an interactive product. Why are these questions so important?
- Who is going to be using the interactive product?
- How is it going to be used?
- Where are they going to use it?
- What activities will the user be doing when interacting with the product?
These are important because they help you to focus on aspects of the context which relate directly to the design of the interaction.
Define Usability
The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfactory in a specified context of use.
Define User Experience
User Experience is how people feel about a product and their pleasure and satisfaction when using it, looking at it, holding it, and opening or closing it. Or more similarly, how a system feels to a user.
What is Interaction Design and what are the results of good Interaction Design?
Interaction Design is defined as ‘designing interactive products to support the way people communicate and interact in their everyday and working lives.’ Interaction Design aims to develop interactive products that are easy, effective and enjoyable to use. Good ID encourages an easy, natural and engaging interaction between user and a system.
Multi-disciplinary teams – Describe three conflicts that may arise in the team as a consequence of differing priorities.
Conflicts that may arise include: the use of imaginatively designed graphics may make buttons less obvious; the development of interactive graphics is also likely to cause the software engineers extra work; the video clips take a long time to download, which make the site less usable.
What is the ID Process activities involve?
- Identifying the needs and establishing requirements for the user experience
- Developing alternative designs that meet those requirements
- Building interactive versions of the design so that they can be communicated and assessed
- Evaluating what is being built throughout the process and the user experience it offers
What are the key characteristics of the interaction design process?
- Users should be involved throughout the development of the project
- Specific usability and user experience goals should be identified, clearly documented and agree upon at the beginning of the project
- Iteration through the four activities is inevitable.
What are the six usability goals?
- Effectiveness: ‘effective to use’
- Efficiency: ‘efficient to use’
- Safety: ‘safe to use’
- Utility: ‘having good utility’
- Learnability: ‘easy to learn’
- Memorability: ‘easy to remember how to use’
What are these questions relevant 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?
Learnability
What is this question relevant 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?
Safety
What is this question relevant 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?
Effectiveness
What is this question relevant to: Does the product provide an appropriate set of functions that will enable users to carry out all theirs tasks in the way they want to do them?
Utility
What is this question relevant 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?
Memorability
What is this question relevant to: Once users have learned how to use a system to carry out their tasks, can they sustain a high level of productivity?
Efficiency
What are the ten user experience goals?
Satisfying, enjoyable, fun, entertaining, helpful, motivating, aesthetically pleasing, supportive of creativity, rewarding and emotionally fulfilling.
What are the five design principles? And the sixth principle?
Visibility, feedback, constraints, consistency and affordance. Mapping is the additional principles.
What are design principles used for?
To avoid problems when creating a design and to understand problems within an existing design
Define the Mapping design principle and what it is concerned with?
Mapping concerns the relationship between controls and their effects in the world. An example is the up and down arrows used to represent the up and down movement of the cursor.
Brief description of the Visibility design principle
Controls should be clearly visible, so users can see the controls that are available to them.
Brief description of the Feedback design principle
This is the information sent back to the user to confirm what action has been done and what result has been accomplished.
Brief description of the Constraints design principle
Constraints are ways of restricting the kind of interaction that can take place at a given moment.
Brief description of Consistency design principle
Where a user interface is designed to follow certain rules, such as always selecting objects by clicking the left mouse button.
Brief description of Affordance design principle
Affordance is an aspect of a control that makes it obvious how to use it.
Three reasons why user involvement can be useful
To ensure users activities and goals are taken into account, expectation management (making sure user views and expectations are realistic) and to ensure ownership (users with a sense of ownership are more likely to be receptive to a product).
