Week 1-6 materials Flashcards
What are Don Norman’s 6 Aspects of Design
Visibility
Feedback
Affordance
Mapping
Constraints
Consistency
Define the Concept of Visibility in Interaction Design
Visibility is the concept of a user knowing what their options are and how to access them by just looking at an object.
Define the Concept of Feedback in Interaction Design
The concept of feedback is that a user should receive feedback after every action they perform to let them know if their action is successful or not.
Define the Concept of Affordance in Interaction Design
Affordance is the link between how things look and how they’re used. e. g. When the affordances of a physical object are perceptually obvious, it is easy to know how to interact with it.
Define the Concept of Mapping in Interaction Design
The concept of mapping is that the controls of an object closely resemble their effect.
Define the Concept of Constraints in Interaction Design
Constraints restrict users from a particular form of User Interaction. This prevents the user from being overwhelmed from the range of options.
Define the Concept of Consistency in Interaction Design
Constistency is key as users learn new things easier when patterns are recognised.
Explain perceived and real affordance
There is two types of affordance, perceived and real affordance, Physical objects are said to have real affordance whereas User Interfaces that are screen-based are virtual and therefore do not have real affordance (perceived affordance).
What is problem space?
A framework that contains components for learning about and defining a problem before we hypothesise solutions.
What are the steps of defining problem space? (3)
- Understanding the usability and user experience goals
- Identify and understand technology(ies) involved.
- Define any assumptions and claims.
What is a claim in problem space?
Stating that something is true when it is still open to question.
What is an assumption in problem space?
Taking something for granted that requires further investigation.
Is the articulation of problem space done individually or within a team?
It is done within a team
What are the benefits of problem space articulation within a team? (3)
- Bring on different perspectives (e.g. Project Managers, software engineers, etc.)
- Less chance of incorrect assumptions and unsupported claims in the final design
- Reflection upon ideas in the early stages is very important in helping everyone understand the design
What are the core Problem Space questions asked? (4)
- What are the problems with the existing product or user experience?
- Why do you think they are problems?
- How do you think the proposed design ideas might overcome these?
- if you couldn’t come up with problems:
How do you think your proposed design ideas support, change, or extend the current ways of doing this?
How does problem space relate to design?
A good understanding of the problem space helps to inform the design
What does conceptualising the design space involve?
It involves articulating the proposed solution as a conceptual model with respect to the user experience.
What are the benefits of conceptualising the design space (Conceptual Model) ? (3)
- Orientation: Enabling the design team to ask specific kinds of questions about how the conceptual model will be understood by the targeted users.
- Open-Mindedness: Allowing the team to explore a range of different ideas to address the problems identified.
- Common Ground: Allowing the design team to establish a set of common terms that all can understand and agree upon, reducing the chance of misunderstandings and confusion arising later.
What is a conceptual model?
A high-level description of how a system is organised and how it operates
What are the core components of conceptual models? (4)
- Metaphors and analogies
- The concepts to which people are exposed through the product.
- The relationships between those concepts.
- The mappings between the concepts and the user experience.
What are the issues with using metaphors? (6)
- May break conventional and cultural rules
- Can constrain designers in the way they conceptualise a problem space
- Forces users to only understand the system in terms of the metaphor
- Designers can use bad existing designs and transfer the bad parts over
- Limits designers’ imagination in producing new conceptual models.
- Might just choose the wrong metaphor.
What are the 5 main types of Interaction?
Instructing
Conversing
Manipulating
Exploring
Responding
What does choice of Interaction type depend upon?(3)
- the problem space
- the task and
- the user.
What is the interaction of Instructing?
Where the users issue instructions to a system.
What is the interaction of Conversing?
Where users have a dialog with a system.
What is the interaction of Manipulating?
Where users interact with object in a virtual or physical space by manipulating them.
What is the interaction of Exploring?
Where users move through a virtual environment or a physical space.
What is the interaction of Responding?
Where the system initiates the interaction and the user chooses whether to respond.
What are some signs of good usability
- The Design communicates the interaction
- No Need for extra labels
- Works intuitively
What are the levels of response to a product? (3)
Visceral – how it feels physically or emotionally
Behavioural – functional, what can we do with it
Reflective – e.g. does it reflect our personal or cultural values
What are the goals of usability? (6)
Effective to use
Efficient to use
Safe to use
Have good utility (convenience)
Easy to learn
Easy to remember how to use
What are the User Experience Threads? (4)
Sensual Thread
Emotional Thread
Compositional Thread
Spatio-temporal thread
What is the Sensual thread in UX?
Sensory Engagement at a physical level (see, hear, touch, smell, and taste through our sensory organs)
What is the Emotional Thread in UX?
How do you feel about the product? It refers to value judgments that assign importance to things with respect to our needs and desires
What is the Compositional Thread in UX?
The way that different elements of experience form a coherent
whole. It refers to “the narrative structure, action possibility, plausibility, consequences and
explanations of actions”
What is the Spatio-Temporal Thread in UX?
Space and time of the experience and the influence on it.
What are the goals of User Experience (UX)? (3)
- Be Satisfying, aesthetically pleasing, enjoyable, engaging, pleasurable, exciting, supportive of
creativity - Avoid being frustrating, annoying, unpleasant, patronising, and making one feel stupid.
- However
“I don’t believe there is a set of [User Experience] principles that are applicable in all
situations”
What are personas?
They are rich descriptions of typical users of the product under development on which the designers can focus and for which they can design products.
What is cognition?
It is what goes on in our heads when we carry out our everyday activities
What are the core aspects of cognition? (5)
Attention: What to concentrate on, what we take in
Perception: How information is acquired from the world and transformed into experiences
Memory: What we can bring back to mind
Reading, speaking, listening: Understanding
words and language
Problem-solving, planning, learning, reasoning,
decision-making…
Implications for the interaction design of attention? (6)
- Help direct the user’s attention
- Present (only) the information that is needed right now
- Highlight what is most relevant
- Use techniques that make things stand out like colour, ordering, spacing, underlining, sequencing and animation
- Leave out clutter
- Group related information together
Implications for the interaction design of perception? (4)
- Use icons and graphics that are clear and easy to understand
- Use borders and spacing to indicate grouping
- Spoken words should be clear and audible
- Text and background should contrast, clear fonts, large enough, and text legible
Implications for the interaction design of memory? (8)
- Help users quickly recall or recognise
- Keep procedures short and simple
- Menus and icons are easier than commands
- Use common and familiar icons and commands, place consistently
- A small number of options
- Offer hints to promote memory
- Offer different ways for people to organise
information - Offer search facilities so we don’t have to
remember where we put things
Implications for the interaction design of Language? (2)
- Only 3 items on a spoken menu
- Include options for multiple forms of media
Implications for the interaction design of Problem-solving, planning, learning, reasoning, decision-making…? (2)
- Provide additional (hidden) information/functions for users who wish to understand more about how to carry out an activity more effectively (e.g. web
searching) - Use simple and memorable functions at the interface for computational aids to support rapid decision-making and planning, e.g. for users on the move.
What is a mental model
A conceptual framework that’s developed to explain and predict user behaviour based on theories of cognition. Mental model is the user’s perception of how they can do what they want to do.
How do we form mental models? (4)
- Experience
- Training
- Exploration
- Metaphors
What do mental models represent?
It represents the user’s understanding of how the system works and what it can do
How is the mental model related to the conceptual model?
The mental model is influenced by the conceptual model
How do you create a persona? (4)
- Capture User characteristics
- Synthesise persona from real users
- Should be realistic (not perfect people)
- Bring them to life with a name, some characteristics not relevant to the product, goal and personal background.
How are personas useful? (2)
- Used to focus design on user needs
- Stops getting fixated on general users as many personas may be used to represent users
What not to do when creating a persona?
Do not be sexist/ ageist / ablest
What are user requirements?
The User requirements are a set of descriptions of functions that the system being designed should do. It is created after considering who the users are.
How can user requirements be represented? (3)
- Diagrams of how the system will operate/be used
- Scenarios or interview transcripts
- Mathematically formal descriptions
What are the 2 types of User Requirements?
Functional Requirements
Non-functional requirements
What are functional requirements?
What a system can do (NOT how)
What are non-functional requirements?
Constraints (e.g. running on certain platforms) and Attributes (e.g. appearance, usability…)
What are the rules that User Requirements must follow? (5)
- The following format should be used: The user must/could/should be able to <verb>, The system should/could/must be able to do <verb> for the user</verb></verb>
- Be as specific as possible
- Should be testable/measurable
- Avoid vague wording
- They should be complete and consistent
What are some methods of gathering User Requirements? (6)
- Interviews
- Focus groups
- Participatory design
- Questionnaires
- Researching similar products and use for prompting
- Observing users doing a task
What are the 2 main methods for prioritising requirements?
4-level system - MoSCoW - Must, Should, Could, Won’t have
3-level System - High, Medium, Low
Why should you avoid categorising the importance of requirements using numbers e.g. 1, 2, 3
This can cause confusion between which is the most important and least important requirements to include
