Chapter 2

THE PROCESS OF INTERACTION DESIGN

 Overview
What is involved in Interaction Design?
• Understanding the problem space
• Importance of involving users
• Degrees of user involvement
• What is a user-centered approach?
• Four basic activities of interaction design
• A simple lifecycle model for interaction design
Some practical issues
• Who are the users?
• What are the users’ needs?
• How to generate alternative designs
• How to choose among alternative designs
• How to integrate interaction design activities within other lifecycle
models

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 What is involved in Interaction
Design?
• It is a process:
▪ Focused on discovering requirements, designing to fulfil
requirements, producing prototypes and evaluating them
▪ Focused on users and their goals
▪ Involves trade-offs to balance conflicting requirements
• Generating alternatives and choosing between them
is key
• Four approaches: user-centered design,
activity-centered design, systems design, and genius
design

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 The double diamond of design

Source: Adapted from The Design Process: What is the Double Diamond?
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 Understanding the problem space
Explore
• What is the current user experience?
• Why is a change needed?
• How will this change improve the situation?

Articulating the problem space

• Team effort
• Explore different perspectives
• Avoid incorrect assumptions and unsupported claims

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 Importance of involving users
Expectation management
• Realistic expectations
• No surprises, no disappointments
• Timely training
• Communication, but no hype
Ownership
• Make the users active stakeholders
• More likely to forgive or accept problems
• Can make a big difference in acceptance and success
of product

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 Degrees of user involvement
• Member of the design team
▪ Full time: constant input, but lose touch with users
▪ Part time: patchy input, and very stressful
▪ Short term: inconsistent across project life
▪ Long term: consistent, but lose touch with users
• Face-to-face group or individual activities
• Online contributions from thousands of users
▪ Online Feedback Exchange (OFE) systems
▪ Crowdsourcing design ideas
▪ Citizen science
• User involvement after product release

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What is a user-centered approach?
User-centered approach is based on:
• Early focus on users and tasks: directly studying
cognitive, behavioral, anthropomorphic, and attitudinal
characteristics
• Empirical measurement: users’ reactions and
performance to scenarios, manuals, simulations, and
prototypes are observed, recorded, and analyzed
• Iterative design: when problems are found in user
testing, fix them and carry out more tests

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 Four basic activities of
Interaction Design
1. Discovering requirements
2. Designing alternatives
3. Prototyping alternative designs
4. Evaluating product and its user
experience throughout

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A simple interaction design
lifecycle model
Exemplifies a user-centered design approach

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 Another lifecycle model:
Google Design Sprints (Knapp et al., 2016)

Source: Google Design Sprints (used courtesy of Agile Marketing)

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 Another lifecycle model:
Research in the Wild (Rogers and Marshall, 2017)

A framework for research in the wild studies

Source: Rogers and Marshall, 2017, p6. (used courtesy of Morgan and Claypool)
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 Some practical issues
• Who are the users?
• What are the users’ needs?
• How to generate alternative designs?
• How to choose among alternatives?
• How to integrate interaction design
activities with other lifecycle models?

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Who are the users/stakeholders?
Not obvious
• 382 distinct types of users for smartphone apps (Sha
Zhao et al, 2016)
• Many products are intended for use by large sections
of the population, so user is “everybody”
• More targeted products are associated with specific
roles
Stakeholders
• Larger than the group of direct users
• Identifying stakeholders helps identify groups to
include in interaction design activities

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 What are the users’ needs?
• Users rarely know what is possible
• Instead:
▪ Explore the problem space
▪ Investigate who are the users
▪ Investigate user activities to see what can be improved
▪ Try out ideas with potential users

• Focus on peoples’ goals, usability, and user experience

goals, rather than expect stakeholders to articulate
requirements

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 How to generate alternatives
• Humans tend to stick with something that works
• Considering alternatives helps identify better
designs
• Where do alternative designs come from?
▪ ‘Flair and creativity’: research and synthesis
▪ Cross-fertilization of ideas from different perspectives
▪ Users can generate different designs
▪ Product evolution based on changing use
▪ Seek inspiration: similar products and domain, or
different products and domain
• Balancing constraints and trade-offs
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How to choose among alternatives
• Interaction design focuses on externally-visible and
measurable behavior
• Technical feasibility
• Evaluation with users or peers
▪ Prototypes not static documentation because behavior is key
• A/B Testing
▪ Online method to inform choice between alternatives
▪ Nontrivial to set appropriate metrics and choose user group sets

• Quality thresholds
▪ Different stakeholder groups have different quality thresholds
▪ Usability and user experience goals lead to relevant criteria

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How to integrate interaction design
activities within other models
• Integrating interaction design activities in lifecycle
models from other disciplines requires careful planning
• Software development lifecycle models are prominent
• Integrating with agile software development is promising
because:
▪ It incorporates tight iterations
▪ It champions early and regular feedback
▪ It handles emergent requirements
▪ It aims to strike a balance between flexibility and structure

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 Some key points
Four basic activities in interaction design
process
▪ Discovering requirements
▪ Designing alternatives
▪ Prototyping
▪ Evaluating
User-centered design rests on three principles
▪ Early focus on users and tasks
▪ Empirical measurement using quantifiable and
measurable usability criteria
▪ Iterative design
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