Week 1: Class Introduction

Required Readings for the Week of: January 22nd (Mon)

 Read Ch 1+ Notes; Read Ch 2 + Notes
 Shackel +Notes; Grudin + Notes
 Class PPT/Lecture
 Discussion Questions

Chapter 1: What is Interaction Design? AND LECTURE 1 NOTES

1.1 Introduction: The main aim of interaction design is to reduce the negative aspects (i.e. frustration, annoyance) of the use experience, while enhancing the
positive aspects (i.e. enjoyment, engagement)

1.2 Good and Poor Design: A central concern is to develop interactive products that are usable, meaning---easy to learn, effective to use, and providing the user
with an enjoyable experience. Good Design: less steps, kind of intuitive usage (don’t have to read a lot of instructions); relies on people’s everyday
knowledge; easy, pleasure to use; based on how everyday objects behave KNOW YOUR SETTING

1.2.1 What to Design: Consider the following factors: who is going to be using them, how are they going to be used, where are they going to be used.
(who are the users; what activities are being carried out; where is the interaction taking place)
 Looking at the kinds of activities people are doing when interacting with the products (i.e. banks need to be secure and trustworthy)
 Question: How do you optimize the users’ interactions with a system, environment, or product so that they support and extend the users’
activities in an effective, useful, and usable way?
o Taking into account what people are good and bad at
o Consider what might help people with the way they currently do things
o Think through what might provide quality user experience
o Listen to what people want and getting involved in the design
o Using tried and tested user based techniques during the design process.
1.3 What Is Interaction Design: Designing interactive products to support the ways people communicate and interact in their everyday and working lives. The
design of spaces for human communication and interaction. Goals: develop usable products and involve the users in the design process.
1.3.1 The Components of Interaction Design: many different methods, philosophies, lenses IDThe broad umbrella that covers all disciplines, fields
and approaches concerned with researching and designing computer based systems for people.
1.3.2 Who is Involved in Interaction Design? You have to know a lot of different things… how people react to events, how they communicate and
interact with each other. How emotions work, what is meant by aesthetics, desirability, and the role of narrative in the human experience.
 Often involves multidisciplinary teams: i.e. engineers, designers, programmers, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, artists,
toy makers.
o Why? Different perspectives and ways of seeing and talking about things. Benefits: more ideas and designs generated;
Cons: difficult to communicate and progress forward the designs being created.
 Design Practices Contributing to ID: Graphic design, product design; artist design; industrial design; film industry.

1.3.3 Interaction Design Consultants: design products, services, and environments for other companies
1.4 The User Experience: how a product behaves and is used by people in the real world. Looking at how people feel about a product, and their pleasure and
satisfaction when using it, looking at it, holding it, and opening and closing it. Cannot design a user experience, only design for a user experience.
 Central importance: usability, functionality, aesthetics, the content, the look and feel, and the sensual and emotional appeal. Also, fun, health
social capital and cultural identity ( age, ethnicity, race, disability, family status, occupation, education)
 McCarthy and Wright-- Technology as Experience: user experience largely in terms of how it is felt by the user: sensual, cerebral, and emotional
threads
o Sensual: sensory engagement; level of absorption people have with various technological devices (i.e. computer games, highly
absorbed)
o Emotional: i.e. sorrow, anger, joy happiness. Emotions involve making judgments of value.
o Compositional: the narrative part of the experience; how the person makes sense of it.
o Spatio-Temporal Thread: space and time in which our experience take place and their effect upon those experiences.
1.5 The Process of Interaction Design: Four Basic Activities: 1) Establishing Requirements, 2) Designing Alternatives, 3) Prototyping, 4) Evaluating.
 Core Characteristics: users should 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 a project; iteration is needed through the core activities.
 Why? One size does not fit all; identify incorrect assumptions about particular groups; be aware of both people’s sensitivities and their capabilities.
 Accessibility: the degree to which an interactive product is accessible by as many people as possible
 Disability: mental/physical impairment; impairment has an adverse effect on their ability to carry out normal day to day activities; adverse affect is
substantial or long term (color blindness, dyslexia, physical impairments).
1.6 Interaction Design and the User Experience: need to be clear about the primary objective of developing an interactive product. Is it to design and efficient
system or is it design a learning tool… or something else?
 Classify them in terms of usability (i.e. efficiency) and user-experience goals (nature of experience i.e. aesthetically pleasing)

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1.6.1 Usability Goals: Refers to ensuring that interactive products are easy to learn, effective to use, and enjoyable from the user’s perspective. Does
not address the quality of the experience
o Effectiveness—effective to use: how good a product is doing at what it is supposed to be doing
o Efficiency—efficient to use: the way a product supports users in carrying out their tasks
 Ask: is the product capable of allowing people to learn, carry out their work efficiently, access information they need, or buy the
goods they want.
o Safety—safe to use
 Ask: 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 situation. (external conditions where people
work and helping any kind of users avoid dangers of carrying out unwanted actions ) It could also refer to perceived fears
users might have of the consequences of making errors and how this effects behaviors.
o Utility—having good utility
 Ask: What is the ranger 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 products provide the right kind of functionality so that users can do what they need to
do.
o Learnability—easy to learn
 Ask: 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?
 Refers to how easy a system is to use; how much time users are prepared to spend learning a product.
o Memorability—easy to remember how to use
 Ask: is it possible fro 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 this way?
 How easy a product is to remember how to use once learned. Users shouldn’t have to be reminded how to use products.

1.6.2 User Experience Goals: Subjective qualities: how a system feels to a user.
o Selecting terms to convey a person’s feelings, emotions…can help designers understand the multifaceted nature of the user experience
o How do usability goals differ from user experience goals?
o Are there tradeoffs between the two kinds of goals?
o How easy is it to measure usability versus user experience goals?
o

1.6.3 Design Principles: used by interaction designers to aid their thinking when designing for the user experience (i.e. visibility, feedback, constraints,
consistency, affordance)
o Visibility: the more visible the functions are, the more likely it is that users will know what to do next; when functions are out of sight, it
makes them more difficult to find and know how to use.
o Feedback: Sending information back to the user about what action has been done and what has been accomplished, allowing the
person to continue with the activity. Includes sound, highlighting, animation, and combinations of these
o Constraints: Determining the way of restricting the kinds of user interaction that can take place at a given moment. (i.e. de-activate
certain menu options) Helps prevent users from selecting incorrect options; physical objects can be designed to constrain
o Consistency: designing interfaces to have similar operations and use similar elements for achieving similar tasks. Easier to learn and
use. You can have inconsistent interfaces (exception)…but it might make it more difficult for users to remember and make the users more
prone to mistakes
 Internal: designing operations to behave the same within an application
 External: designing operations interfaces to be the same across applications and devices.
o Affordance: an attribute of an object that allows people to know how to use it. i.e. its like giving them a clue. 1) perceived and 2) real.
Physical objects---know how to interact with; have real affordance like grasping vs Perceived—screen based…and learned.

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Chapter 2: Understanding and Conceptualizing Interaction Design AND LECTURE 2 NOTES

2.1 Introduction
2.2 Understanding the Problem Space and Conceptualizing Interaction
 It is important to have a good understanding of the problem space, specifying what it is you are doing, why, and how it will support users in they way
they intended.
 Want to understand: and conceptualize what is currently the user experience/ product, and how this is going to be improved changed.
 Pre-Requisite: identifying usability and user experience goals.
 Make EXPLICIT underlying claims and assumptions –less chance of incorrect assumptions and unsupported claims in the design; want to make sure
assumptions are right!
 Claim: stating something to be true when it is still open to question.
 Core Questions to Ask:
 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 have not identified any problems and instead 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 Conceptualization:
 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: preventing the design team from becoming narrowly focused early on
 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 confusions later on.
 Having a good understanding of the problem space can help inform the design space.

2.3 Conceptual Models: a high level description of how a system is organized and operates. It is an abstraction outlining what people can do with a product and
what concepts are needed to understand how to interact with it.
 Fundamental Aspect of ID= to develop a conceptual model; Best conceptual models are those that appear obvious; support being intuitive.
 Core Components:
 Metaphors and Analogies: convey to people how to understand what a product is for and how to use it for an activity (i.e.
browsing/bookmarking)
 Concepts:
 Design Concept: a set of ideas for a designs. i.e. scenarios, images, mood boards, or text based documents
 The concepts that people are exposed to through their product, including the task domain objects they create and manipulate,
their attributes, and the operations that can be performed on them.
 Their Relationships: the relationships between those concepts
 Mappings: The mappings between the concepts and the user experience the product –is designed to support or invoke
 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 kind of interaction modes and styles to use?

2.4 Interface Metaphors: they provide a structure that is similar in some ways to aspects of a familiar entity but also have their own behaviors and properties (i.e.
search engine)
 Provide familiar entitles that enable people to readily understand the underlying conceptual model and know what to do at an interface.
 Conceptualize what we are doing (i.e. surfing the web); can be designed to be similar to a physical entity but also has own properties
 Can be based on activity, object or a combination of both
 Exploit user’s familiar knowledge helping them understand the familiar
 Benefits; 1) makes learning new systems easier 2) helps users understand the conceptual model, 3) can be very innovative and enable the realm of
computers
 Problems: Break conventional and cultural rules (i.e. trashcan on desktop); can constrain designers in they way they conceptualize a problem space.
Conflict with design principles; force users to only understand system in term of the metaphor; limits designers imagination in coming up with new
conceptual models.
 Material Metaphor: the card—organizing limited content that is card size; has a familiar form factor. Giving the appearance and physical behavior (i.e.
surface of paper)
 M and Analogies are used in 3 Main Ways:
 1) As a way of conceptualizing what were are doing (e.g. surfing the web)
 2) As a conceptual model instantiated at the interface (i.e. the card metaphor)
 3) As a way of visualizing an operation (e.g. shopping cart, that we put items into)

2.5 Interaction Types: Four main types: instructing, conversing, manipulating, and exploring. Factors include the cost and other product constraints.
2.5.1 Instructing: users issue instructions to a system. (I.e. typing in commands, selecting options from menus in a windows, speaking aloud commands,
gesturing, pressing buttons)
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  Benefits: quick and efficient; especially where you need to frequently repeat actions performed on multiple objects like saving, deleting, and
organizing fields
2.5.2 Conversing: users have a dialog with the system. (i.e. users can speak via an interface or type in question to which the system replies via text or
speech output. System is designed to respond in a way another human being might when having a conversation.
 2 Way communication process.
 Most commonly used for applications where the user needs to find out specific kinds of information or wants to discuss issues (i.e. advisory,
help facilities, and search engines)
 Benefits: people get to interact in a way familiar to them
 Cons: certain kinds of tasks are transformed into cumbersome and one sided interactions
2.5.3 Manipulating: users interact with objects in a virtual or physical space
 Manipulating objects and capitalizes on users’ knowledge of how they do so in the physical world (i.e. moving, selecting, opening, and closing)
 Direct Manipulation: digital objects be designed at the interface so they can be interacted with in ways that are analogous to how physical
objects in the physical world are manipulated. Manipulation interfaces are assumed to enable users to feel that they are directly controlling the
digital objects represented by computers
 1) Continuous representation of the objects and actions of interest
 2) rapid reversible incremental actions with immediate feedback about the object of interest
 3) Physical actions and button pressing instead of issuing commands with complex syntax.
 Benefits—so enjoyable: helps beg learn basic functions rapidly; enables experienced users to work rapidly on wide range of tasks,
allows infrequent users to remember how to do operations; prevents the need for error message; shows users immed how actions
further goals; reduces users experience of anxiety; helps users gain confidence and master and feel in control.
 Cons: not all tasks can be described by objects and not all actions can be undertaken directly. Some tasks are better achieved
through issuing commands.

2.5.4 Exploring: where users move through a virtual environment or a physical space—enable people to explore and interact with an environment, be it
physical or digital by exploring their knowledge and how they move and navigate through existing space. Physical environments embedded sensor
technologies.
2.5.5 Which Conceptual Model is the Best
 Direct Manipulation good for doing types of tasks (designing, drawing, flying, driving, sizing windows)
 Issuing Instructions repetitive tasks; e.g. spell checking and file management
 Having a Conversation good for children, computer-phobic, disable users and specialized applications
 Hybrid conceptual models are often employed where different ways of carrying out the same actions is support at the interface but can take long.
 Interaction Type: what the user is doing when interacting with a system (e.g. instructing, talking browsing)
 Interface Type: the type of interface used to support the mode e.g. speech—menu based gesture.

2.6 Paradigms, Visions, Theories, Models, Frameworks

2.6.1 Paradigms: general approach that has been adopted by a community of researches and designers for carrying out their work in terms of shared
assumptions, concepts, values and practices.
 The questions to be asked and how they should be framed
 The phenomena to be observed
 The way in which findings from studies are to be analyzed and interpreted.
 Examples: Old—WIMP; then Weiser had ubiquitous technology—computers would become part of the environment, embedded in a variety of
everyday objects, devices, and displays.

2.6.2 Visions: a future scenario that frames research and development in interaction design (often in a film or a narrative)
 Internet of Things: where people, objects, and animals are all connected through the internet have their own unique identifier.
2.6.3 Theories: a well substantiated explanation of some aspect of a phenomenon
 Means analyzing and predicting the performance of users carrying out tasks for specific kinds of computer interfaces and systems (cognitive,
social, and organizational in origin)
2.6.4 Models: a simplification of some aspect of human computer interaction intended to make it easier for designers to predict and evaluate alternative
designs.
2.6.5 Frameworks: a set of interrelated concepts and or a set of specific questions that are intended to inform a particular domain area
 Unlike a model which is a simplification of a phenomenon, a framework offers advice to designers as to what to design or look for
 Many forms: steps, questions, concepts, challenges, principles, tactics and dimensions.