Chapter -2 UNDERSTANDING AND CONCEPTUALIZING Flashcards
Facilitating user experiences through designing interactions:
Make work effective, efficient and safer
Improve and enhance learning and training
Provide enjoyable and exciting entertainment
Enhance communication and understanding
Support new forms of creativity and expression
Understanding the Problem Space and Conceptualizing Interaction
What do you want to create?
What are your assumptions?
Will it achieve what you hope it will?
What is an assumption?
taking something for granted when it needs further investigation
e.g. people will want to watch TV while driving
What is a claim?
stating something to be true when it is still open to question
e.g. a multimodal style of interaction for controlling GPS — one that involves speaking while driving — is safe
A framework for analysing the problem space
Are there problems with an existing product or user experience? If so, what are they?
Why do you think there are problems?
How do you think your proposed design ideas might overcome these?
If you are designing for a new user experience how do you think your proposed design ideas support, change, or extend current ways of doing things?
Benefits of conceptualising
Orientation
enables design teams to ask specific questions about how the conceptual model will be understood
Open-minded
prevents design teams from becoming narrowly focused early on
Common ground
allows design teams to establish a set of commonly agreed terms
Conceptual Models:
Enables:
A conceptual model is:
“…a high-level description of how a system is organized and operates
Enables
“…designers to straighten out their thinking before they start laying out their widgets”
Components
Metaphors and analogies
understand what a product is for and how to use it for an activity
Concepts that people are exposed to through the product
task–domain objects, their attributes, and operations (e.g. saving, revisiting, organizing)
Relationship and mappings between these concepts
First steps in formulating a conceptual model
What will the users be doing when carrying out their tasks?
How will the system support these?
What kind of interface metaphor, if any, will be appropriate?
What kinds of interaction modes and styles to use?
Benefits of interface metaphors
Makes learning new systems easier
Helps users understand the underlying conceptual model
Can be very innovative and enable the realm of computers and their applications to be made more accessible to a greater diversity of users
Interaction types
Instructing
issuing commands and selecting options
Conversing
interacting with a system as if having a conversation
Manipulating
interacting with objects in a virtual or physical space by manipulating them
Exploring
moving through a virtual environment or a physical space
Which conceptual model is best?
Direct manipulation is good for ‘doing’ types of tasks, e.g. designing, drawing, flying, driving, sizing windows
Issuing instructions is good for repetitive tasks, e.g. spell-checking, file management
Having a conversation is good for children, computer-phobic, disabled users and specialised applications (e.g. phone services)
Hybrid conceptual models are often employed, where different ways of carrying out the same actions is supported at the interface - but can take longer to learn
Conceptual models: interaction and interface
Interaction type:
what the user is doing when interacting with a system, e.g. instructing, talking, browsing or other
Interface type:
the kind of interface used to support the mode, e.g. speech, menu-based, gesture
Many kinds of interface types available including
Command Speech Data-entry Form fill-in Query Graphical Web Pen Augmented reality Gesture
Which interaction type to choose?
Need to determine requirements and user needs
Take budget and other constraints into account
Also will depend on suitability of technology for activity being supported
This is covered in course when designing conceptual models
