What is interaction design?

Question 1

What is interaction design?

Answer 1

Interaction design: developing interactive products that are usable (easy to learn, effective to use, provide an enjoyable experience for the intended people).

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

Question 2

What is the key question for interactive design?

Answer 2

“How do you optimize the users’ interactions with a system, environment, or product so that they support the users’ activities in effective, useful, usable and pleasurable
ways?”

Question 3

What is interaction design about?

Answer 3

It is about creating user experiences that enhance and augment the way people work, communicate, and interact.

Question 4

What are the differences between interaction design, user interface and user experience?

Answer 4

• User interface (UI) is how the product is represented to the users (employees working in a store)
• Interaction design (IxD) represents an engaging interface which the user communicates with to achieve his goal (engagement of the clients with employees).
• User experience (UX) is the overall experience while interacting with
  the product. It focuses on the user’s feelings such as satisfaction, sadness, disappointment (feeling of the user towards the store in general).

Question 5

What are the 3 ways of looking at interaction design?

Answer 5

The technology-centered view → interaction designers make (digital)
technology useful, usable, and pleasurable to use (the rise of software and
the internet was also the rise of the field of interaction design).

The behaviorist view → interaction design is about defining the behavior of
artifacts, environments, and systems (e.g., products). This view focuses on
functionality and feedback: how products behave and provide feedback
based on what the people engaged with them are doing.

The social interaction design view → the broadest view of interaction design is
that it is inherently social, revolving around facilitating communication
between humans through products. Technology is nearly irrelevant in this
view; any kind of object or device can make a connection between people.

Question 6

Who is involved in interaction design?

Answer 6

• Interaction design is ideally carried out by multidisciplinary teams, where
  the skill sets of engineers, designers, programmers, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, marketing people, artists, toy makers, product managers, and others are drawn upon.
• Who to include in a team will depend on a number of factors, including a company’s design philosophy, size, purpose, and product line.

Question 7

What is the USER EXPERIENCE?

Answer 7

The user experience refers to how a product behaves and is used by people in the real world.

• It is about how people feel about a product and their pleasure and
  satisfaction when using it.

Question 8

What aspects of user experience can we take into consideration with interaction design?

Answer 8

Usability, functionality, aesthetics, content, look and feel, and emotional appeal.

Question 9

What is accessibility and what is inclusiveness?

Answer 9

• Accessibility → the extent to which an interactive product is accessible by as many people as possible.
• Inclusiveness → being fair, open, and equal to everyone.

Question 10

What is usability and what are its goals?

Answer 10

• Usability → ensuring that interactive products are easy to learn,
  effective to use, and enjoyable from the user’s perspective.

Usability is broken down into the following six goals:
* 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 11

Explain each of the goals of usability.

Answer 11

• (i) Effectiveness is a general goal, and it refers to how good a product is at doing what it is supposed to do.
  Effectiveness is about whether users can complete their goals with a high degree of accuracy.
• (ii) Efficiency refers to the way a product supports users in carrying out their tasks.
  Efficiency is all about speed. How fast can the user get the job done?
• Safety involves protecting the user from dangerous conditions and undesirable
  situations.
  Helping any kind of user in any kind of situation to avoid the dangers of carrying out unwanted actions accidentally.
• 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. Utility is about providing functions that users need in the first place.
• Learnability refers to how easy a system is to learn to use.
• Memorability refers to how easy a product is to remember how to use, once learned.

Question 12

What are the most common usability criteria?

Answer 12

Examples of commonly used usability criteria are:
* time to complete a task (efficiency),
* time to learn a task (learnability), and
* the number of errors made when carrying out a given task over time (memorability).

Question 13

What are User experience goals?

Answer 13

They differ from the more objective usability goals in that they are concerned with how users experience an interactive product from their perspective, rather than assessing how useful or productive a system is from its own perspective.

Question 14

What are the main laws and principles of interaction design?

Answer 14

1. Fitts’ law
2. Hick’s law
3. Tesler’s law
4. The Poka-Yoke principle
5. The magical number seven
6. The five dimensions of interaction design
7. Design principles

Question 15

Explain Fitts law.

Answer 15

Fitts’s law allows to predict a time it takes a user to point at an object using a specific pointing device (such as a mouse, trackball, trackpad, or even a finger).

It helps us in designing user interfaces (deciding the location and size
of buttons and other elements) and choosing the right pointing device
for the task.
How to apply it in practice?
* Shorten the distance between action A and action B.
* Place common elements in like manner.
* Make interactive elements big enough so users can aim easily.
* Provide a lot of clickable space around a link (or just make it a button).

Question 16

Explain Hicks’ law.

Answer 16

Hick’s law dictates that the greater the number of choices, the longer it takes to make a decision.

Giving a lot of choice is not always a good thing.
Despite the fact that users are instinctively drawn to products with more features, simpler solutions bring more satisfaction.
How to apply it in practice?
* Reduce the number of menu elements and put them in categories.
* Highlight Search and Filter features.
* Break down the checkout or any long form-filling process into manageable steps.
* Leave out excessive customization options.

Question 17

Explain Tesler’s law.

Answer 17

In the mid-1980s, Apple computer scientist and then vice president at Apple Larry Tesler came up with a model that states: “Every application must have an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is who will have to deal with it.”
* This law is basically the foundation of today’s trend toward minimalist interfaces, in which users don’t have to deal with complexity – because developers do.
* How to apply it in practice?
* Embrace radical decisions and start with the final and cleanest state of the design.
* Never skip user testing.

Question 18

Explain The Poka-Yoke principle.

Answer 18

• A Japanese term → “error proofing.”
• Like many Japanese inventions, poka-yoke is almost an art, creative thinking to avoid false interactions, misclicking, and performing subconscious actions.
• In real life, you can see the poka-yoke principle applied to sink holes that prevent them from overflowing. Or car alerts that don’t stop until you plug in the seatbelt. In virtual interfaces, the technique is applied when the system asks you to retype a new
  password.
  How to apply it in practice?
• Make high-level administrative actions (like deleting an account) hard to access.
• Give a warning before any irreversible action, e.g. that an item will be deleted permanently.
• Allow for spell-checking if there’s a chatting element in your product.
• Warn a user about the needed number of password characters before the input.

Question 19

Explain Miller‘s law: The magical number seven.

Answer 19

• The average number of items a human can hold in their working memory is 7±2 → This means that on one exposure, a human can remember 5 to 9 items, namely items of the same attribute.
• “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Ou Capacity for Processing Information” is one of the most highly cited papers in psychology. It was written by the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller in 1956.
• Chunking – breaking up a long string of information into small chunks (e.g. phone or social security numbers).
• How to apply it in practice?
• Place 7±2 items in dropdown menus, navigations, bullet lists, or checkboxes

Question 20

Explain The five dimensions of interaction design.

Answer 20

• 1D: Words → This is the language we use to describe interactions and the meaning behind every button, label, or signifier. Words should be clear and familiar to end users, used consistently and appropriately to the setting.
• 2D: Visual representations → These are all typography, imagery, icons, and a color palette that users perceive involuntarily.
• 3D: Physical objects or space → This includes computer keyboards, mice, trackpads, and touchscreens that users interact with and the space they interact within.
• 4D: Time → Motions, sounds, animations – all interactive elements that change over time – give a user an understanding of the progress of their actions and perform the feedback on it.
• 5D: Behavior → It’s how users react to an interaction, their physical or emotional response, whether they’re feeling satisfied or clicking the Next button to continue the process.

Question 21

Explain Design principles.

Answer 21

• Design principles are used by interaction designers to aid their thinking when designing for the user experience → generalizable abstractions intended to orient designers toward thinking about different aspects of their designs.
• Design principles are derived from a mix of theory-based knowledge, experience, and common sense.
• They are intended to help designers explain and improve their designs.
• A number of design principles have been promoted. The best known are concerned with how to determine what users should see and do when carrying out their tasks using an interactive product.
• Design principles (from Don Norman‘s „Design of Everyday Things“)

Question 22

What are the main elements of Design principles?

Answer 22

• ## Visibility

Question 23

Explain Visibility in Design principles.

Answer 23

• The more visible an element is, the more likely users will know about them and how to use them
• The skill in applying this principle is realizing that you can’t make everything visible, because it’ll clutter the interface (instead prioritize).
• Hiding certain functions can be advantageous

Question 24

Explain Feedback in Design principles.

Answer 24

• Feedback is the principle of making it clear to the user what action has been taken and what has been accomplished.

Question 25

Explain Constraints in Design principles.

Answer 25

• Constraints is about limiting the range of interaction possibilities for the user to simplify the interface and guide the user to the appropriate next action. This is a case where constraints are clarifying, since they make it clear what can be done.
• A common design practice in graphical user interfaces is to
  deactivate certain menu options by shading them gray.

Question 26

Explain Mapping in Design principles.

Answer 26

• Mapping is about having a clear relationship between controls and
  the effect they have on the world.

Question 27

Explain Consistency in Design principles.

Answer 27

• Consistency refers to designing interfaces to have similar operations and use similar elements for achieving similar tasks.
• Benefit of consistent interfaces → they are easier to learn and use.

Question 28

Explain Affordance in Design principles.

Answer 28

• Affordance refers to an attribute of an object that allows people
  to know how to use it.
• Essentially to afford means to give a clue.