C1 - What is Interaction Design

Question 1

Why is the TiVo remote so much better designed than standard remote controls?

Answer 1

• Peanut shaped to fit in hand
• Logical layout and color-coded, distinctive buttons
• Easy to locate buttons

Question 2

Designing interactive products requires considering:

Answer 2

• Who is going to be using them?
• How they are going to be used?
• Where they are going to be used?

Question 3

Understanding users’ needs
A key question for interaction design is: how do you optimize the users’ interactions with a system, environment, or product, so that they support and extend the users’ activities in effective, useful, and usable ways?
This involves:

Answer 3

• Need to take into account what people are good and bad at
• Consider what might help people in the way they currently do things
• Think through what might provide quality user experiences
• Listen to what people want and get them involved
• Use tried and tested user-centered methods

Question 4

What is interaction design?

Answer 4

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

Question 5

Goals of interaction design

Answer 5

• Develop usable products

- Involve users in the design process

Question 6

Relationship between ID, HCI and other fields

Academic disciplines contributing to ID:

Answer 6

• Psychology
• Social Sciences
• Computing Sciences
• Engineering
• Ergonomics
• Informatics

Question 7

Design practices contributing to ID:

Answer 7

• Graphic design
• Product design
• Artist-design
• Industrial design
• Film industry

Question 8

Interdisciplinary fields that ‘do’ interaction design:

Answer 8

• HCI
• Ubiquitous Computing
• Human Factors
• Cognitive Engineering
• Cognitive Ergonomics
• Computer Supported Co-operative Work
• Information Systems

Question 9

Who Is Involved in Interaction Design?

Answer 9

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

Question 10

Working in multidisciplinary teams

Answer 10

Benefits
- more ideas and designs generated

Disadvantages
- difficult to communicate and progress forward the
designs being create

Question 11

Increasing number of ID consultancies, examples of well known ones include:

Answer 11

• Nielsen Norman Group: “help companies enter the age of the consumer, designing human-centered products and services”
• Cooper: “From research and product to goal-related design”
• Swim: “provides a wide range of design services, in each case targeted to address the product development needs at hand”
• IDEO: “creates products, services and environments for companies pioneering new ways to provide value to their customers”

Question 12

What do professionals do in the ID business?

Answer 12

• interaction designers - people involved in the design of all the interactive aspects of a product
• usability engineers - people who focus on evaluating products, using usability methods and principles
• web designers - people who develop and create the visual design of websites, such as layouts
• information architects - people who come up with ideas of how to plan and structure interactive products
• user experience designers (UX) - people who do all the above but who may also carry out field studies to inform the design of products

Question 13

The Process of Interaction Design

Answer 13

• Establishing requirements
• Developing alternatives
• Prototyping
• Evaluating

Question 14

Core characteristics of interaction design

Answer 14

• Users should be involved through the development of the project
• Specific usability and user experience goals need to be identified, clearly documented and agreed at the beginning of the project
• Iteration is needed through the core activities

Question 15

Accessibility

Answer 15

“Degree to which a product is usable and accessible by as many people as possible”

Question 16

Usability goals

Answer 16

• 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).

Question 17

Effectiveness:
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Efficiency:
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Safety:
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Utility:
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Learnability:
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Memorability:
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Answer 17

• Effectiveness refers to how good a product is at doing what it is supposed to do.
• Question: Is the product capable of allowing people to learn, carry out their work efficiently, access the information they need, or buy the goods they want?
• Efficiency refers to the way a product supports users in carrying out their tasks.
• Question: Once users have learned how to use a product to carry out their tasks, can they sustain a high level of productivity?
• Safety involves protecting the user from dangerous conditions and undesirable situations.
• Question: 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?
• Utility refers to the extent to which the product provides the right kind of functionality so that users can do what they need or want to do.
• Question: 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?
• Learnability refers to how easy a system is to learn to use.
• Question: 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 in this way?
• Memorability refers to how easy a product is to remember how to use,once learned.
• Question: 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?

Question 18

User experience goals:

Answer 18

• Desirable aspects

- Undesirable aspects

Question 19

Design principles:

Answer 19

• Design principles are used by interaction designers to aid their thinking when designing for the user experience.
• The do’s and don’ts of interaction design
• What to provide and what not to provide at the interface
• Derived from a mix of theory-based knowledge, experience and common-sense

Question 20

Feedback

Answer 20

• Sending information back to the user about what has been done
• Includes sound, highlighting, animation and combinations of these

Question 21

Constraints

Answer 21

• Restricting the possible actions that can be performed
• Helps prevent user from selecting incorrect options
• Physical objects can be designed to constrain things
  e. g. only one way you can insert a key into a lock

Question 22

Consistency

Answer 22

• Design interfaces to have similar operations and use similar elements for similar tasks
• For example:
  always use ctrl key plus first initial of the command for
  an operation – ctrl+C, ctrl+S, ctrl+O
• Main benefit is consistent interfaces are easier to learn and use

Question 23

Affordances: to give a clue

Answer 23

• Refers to an attribute of an object that allows people to know how to use it
  e. g. a mouse button invites pushing, a door handle affords pulling
• Since has been much popularised in interaction design to discuss how to design interface objects
  e. g. scrollbars to afford moving up and down, icons to afford clicking on