Interaction design

Chapter five:
Interaction Design and
HCI in the Software Process
 Outline of Lecture:

 Interaction Design
HCI In the Software Dev.. Process
 Development methodologies

Thursday, January 2
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The main aims of this chapter is to enable you know :

 Describe what and who is involved in the

process of interaction design.
 Enable you to evaluate an interactive
product and explain what is good and what
is bad about in terms goal and core
 Explain the relationship between user
experience and usability

Thursday, January 3
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 What is interaction design?

• Designing interactive products to support the way

people communicate and interact in their everyday
and working lives.
• It is about creating user experiences that enhance
and augment the way people work , communicate,
and interact.
• Designing spaces for human communication and
interaction.
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 Interaction Design Aim ?

• Reduce the negative aspects

• Enhance the positive aspects
• Developing interactive products
• That are
• Easy
• Effective
• Pleasurable to use

Thursday, January 5
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 What is mean by Design?

• Design is a buzzy word. Some people think design

means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper,
it’s really how it works. (Steve Jobs)
• Design is about taking an original idea and applying
a point of view by translating it into presentable,
tangible elements for ease of sharing with others.

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 What to design

• Designing interactive products requires:

• Who is going to be using them
• How they are going to be used.
• Where they are going to be used.

Thursday, January 7
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 What is interaction design process

• The interaction design(IXD) process is what

designer use to create solution centered on user’s
needs, aim and behavior when interacting with
product.

• The IXD process involve 5 stages: discovering

what user need/want , analyzing that , designing
potential solution, prototyping it and implementing
and deploying it.
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 1. Find user needs(wants)
• It’s easy to assume you know what users want/need
and their relevant contexts. Discover their real
requirements:
• observe people
• Interview people
• Examine existing solution

Thursday, January 9
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 2. Do analysis
• Do analysis to sort and order your findings so they
make sense. This may be through a:This may be
through
• Narrative/story of how someone uses a system.
• Task analysis, breaking down a user’s steps/sub-steps.

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 3.Design a potential solution

• Design a potential solution according to design

guidelines and fundamental design principles (e.g.,
giving appropriate feedback for users’ actions).
• Use the best techniques to match how users will
interact with it in terms of, for example, navigation.

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 4. Start prototyping
• Give users an idea of what the product will look like
and let them test it, and/or give it to experts to
evaluate its effectiveness using heuristics.

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Implement and deploy what you have built.

• The IxD process is iterative—nobody designs anything

right the first time, especially regarding more innovative
solutions.
• It may indeed take many iterations before you pinpoint the
ideal version of a solution. So, you (and your design team)
should continue testing and adapting appropriate changes
around an ever-clearer understanding of your users’ needs.
• For example, you could gather user feedback and monitor
support chats to find areas for improvement.
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 THE PROCESS OF DESIGN

Fig 1: Interaction design process Thursday, January 14

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 Importance of Interaction
Design
• Poor design can:
– reduce user productivity
– increase learning times
– increase errors
– induce frustration
– lead to system rejection by the user
• Poor design is easy, good design is hard
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 Which kind of design?

• Number of other terms used emphasizing what is

being designed, e.g.
 user interface design, software design, user centred design,
product design, web design, experience design (UX)

• Interaction design is the umbrella term covering

all of these aspects
 fundamental to all disciplines, fields, and approaches concerned
with researching and designing computer-based systems for
people.
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HCI and interaction design

Thursday, January 17
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 Who is involved in ID?
• interaction designers - people involved in the design of all the
interactive aspects of a product.

• usability engineers - people who focus on evaluating products,

using usability methods and principles.

• web designers - people who develop and create the visual design
of websites, such as layouts.

• information architects - people who come up with ideas of how to

plan and structure interactive products.

• user experience designers (UX) - people who do all the above but
who may also carry out field studies to inform the design of
products. Thursday, January 18
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 UX
• Sometimes refer to UX as UXD
• Meant to encourage design thinking that focus on
the quality of the user experience rather than on the
set of design methods to use.
• It is not enough that we build products that
functions, that are understandable and usable , we
also need to build joy and excitement, pleasure and
fun, and yes, beauty to people ‘s lives.

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 UX

• Usability
• Functionality
• Aesthetics
• Content
• Look and feel
• Sensual and emotional appeal
• Fun
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UX VS UI

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 Good design

• Takes into account:

– Who the users are – People
– What activities are being carried out - Activities
– Where the interaction is taking place - Context
– What technologies are used - Technologies
• User-centric View of Design Problems: PACT

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 PACT Analysis
• The Main idea of PACT analysis is that people carry out
activities in contexts using technologies.
• PACT Analysis for determining requirements of
interactive systems and consists of four parts.

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 People: Who are the
users/stakeholders?
• Those who interact directly with the product
– those who manage direct users
– those who receive output from the product
– those who make the purchasing decision
– those who use competitor’s products
•Three categories of user (Eason, 1987):
– primary: frequent hands-on
– secondary: occasional or via someone else
– tertiary: affected by its introduction, or will influence its purchase
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 People: variability

Consider range of characteristics of people:

• Physiologically
– Age differences, physical abilities
• Psychologically
– Attention, perception, memory
– Forming the right ‘mental model’
• Socially and Culturally
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 People: What are the users’ capabilities?

• Humans vary in many dimensions:

— size of hands may affect the size and positioning of
input buttons
— motor abilities may affect the suitability of certain
input and output devices
— height if designing a physical kiosk
— strength - a child’s toy requires little strength to
operate, but greater strength to change batteries
— different abilities (e.g. sight, hearing, dexterity)
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 Activities

• What is the overall purpose of the activity?

• There are many characteristics of activities that
designers need to consider.
– What has to be satisfied
– Hedonic vs. Pragmatic
• Temporal aspect
– Regular or infrequent
– Time pressure
– Continuous or interruptions
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– Processing time 27, 2022

 Activities

• Cooperation
– One or more actors
• Complexity
– Well defined or vague?
• Safety critical
– Impact of error (how much?)
• The nature of the content
– Type of data to be processed
– Type of media
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 Context
• Where does the interaction occur?
– Physical context
• Noise, light, time
• In the office, on the move
– Social context
• Individual activity, group activity
• Computer-mediated social activity
• Social norms
– Psychological context
• Motivation, attitudes
• Cognitive demands
• Level of arousal Thursday, January 29
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 Technology

• Input
– Getting data in; getting commands;
• Output
– video vs. photographs; speech vs. screen
• Communication
– Between people, between devices, speed,
• Content
– What data in the system: a web site is all about content
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 Key characteristics of ID,..

– Focus on users early in the design and evaluation of

the artifact
– Identify, document and agree specific usability and
user experience goals at the beginning of the
project
– Iteration is inevitable. Designers never get it right
first time

Thursday, January 31
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 Understanding user needs
• ASK-WATCH-ANALYSE
• Users rarely know what is possible they can’t tell you what they
‘need’ to help them achieve their goals
• Take into account people’s capabilities
• Look at existing tasks:
– their context
– what information do they require?
– who collaborates to achieve the task?
– why is the task achieved the way it is?
• Envisioned tasks:
– can be rooted in existing behavior
– can be described Thursday, January 32
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 Develop alternative design

• Considering alternatives is important to ‘break out of

the box’.
• Designers are trained to consider alternatives, software
people generally are not.
• How do you generate alternatives?
— ‘Flair and creativity’: research and synthesis
— ‘Seek inspiration’: look at similar products or look at
very different products.
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 How do you choose among alternatives?
• Evaluation with users or with peers, e.g. prototypes
• Technical feasibility: some not possible
• Quality thresholds: Usability goals lead to usability
criteria set early on and checked regularly
— safety: how safe?
— utility: which functions are superfluous?
— effectiveness: appropriate support? task coverage,
information available
— efficiency: performance measurements
– Easy to learn
– Easy to remember how to use.
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 User requirements,
• Identifying needs
– Understand as much as possible about the
user, their work and the context of use
– See PACT analysis
• Establish a set of ‘stable’ requirements
– Requirements MUST be justified and related
to data
– Set up clear success metrics, usability, user
experience requirements.
 Requirements …How is it
done?
• Data gathering activities
• Data analysis activities
• Expression as ‘requirements’
• All of this is iterative

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 Requirements type

• Functional
– Fundamental or essential characteristics of
the product
– Describe what the product has to do or what
processing actions it is to take
– Historically the main focus of requirements
activities
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 Example

• For a multifunction PDA

– Phones function must be accessible while connected
to the internet
• For a nuclear power control system
– The system will be able to monitor the temperature of
the reactors

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 Requirements type (2)

• Non functional
– Properties that the functions must have
– Describe the constraints that there are on the system and
its development
– Covers a number of aspects of design: image,
usability, performance, maintainability, security,
cultural acceptability, etc.
– As important as functional requirements for the
product's success.
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 Example

• For a multifunction PDA – Look and feel

– The system must present an up-market, business like
image
• For a nuclear power control system - Usability
– Warnings signals MUST be clear and unambiguous.

Thursday, January 40
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 User requirements

• Users: Who are they?

– Characteristics: ability, background, attitude to computers
• System use: novice, expert, casual, frequent
– Novice: step-by-step (prompted), constrained, clear
information, e.g., wizard prompting
– Expert: flexibility, access power
– Frequent: short cuts
– Casual/infrequent: clear instructions, e.g., menu paths,
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 Data-gathering

• Studying Documentations
• Researching similar products
• Interviews
• Questionnaires
• Observation

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 Studying Documentation

• Procedures and rules are often written down in Manuals

• Good source of data about the steps involved in
an activity and any regulations governing a task
• Good for understanding legislation, and getting
background information
• Not to be used in isolation
• Advantage: No stakeholders time consumed
Thursday, January 43
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 Observation
• Naturalistic observation:
– Spend time with stakeholders in their day-to-day
tasks, observing their activities
• Gain insights into stakeholders’ tasks
• Good for understanding the nature and context
of the tasks
• It requires time and commitment from a member
of the design team, and can result in a huge amount of data

Thursday, January 44
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 Questionnaires

• A series of questions designed to elicit specific

Information
• Questions may require different kinds of answers:
– not only simple YES/NO; choice between pre-set answers;
Comment
• Often used in conjunction with other techniques
• Can give quantitative or qualitative data
• Good for answering specific questions from a large, dispersed
group of people
Thursday, January 45
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 Interviews & Focus Group
• Structured, unstructured or semi-structured
• Good for exploring issues
• Time consuming and may be infeasible to visit everyone
• Focus group
– Group interviews
– Good at gaining a consensus view and/or highlighting
areas of conflict
• Props e.g. sample scenarios of use, prototypes, can be used
in interviews
Thursday, January 46
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 Problems with data gathering -
stakeholders
• Identifying and involving the right people:
– users, managers, developers, customer reps?, union reps?,
shareholders?
• Involving stakeholders
– workshops, interviews, workplace studies, participatory design
• ‘Real’ users, not managers...
– traditionally a problem in software engineering, but better now
– Availability of key people

Thursday, January 47
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 Problems with data gathering
(2)
• Requirements management: control, ownership
• Communication between parties:
— within development team
— with customer/user
— between users: different parts of an organization use
different terminology
• Domain knowledge distributed and implicit:
— difficult to dig up and understand
— knowledge articulation Thursday, January 48
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 Guidelines

• Involve all the stakeholder groups

• Involve more than one representative from each
stakeholder group
• Use a combination of data gathering techniques
• Support the process with props such as prototypes and
task descriptions
• Run a pilot session
• Consider carefully how to record the data.
Thursday, January 49
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 Personas
• Personas are descriptions of individual people who represent
groups of users that would interact with your system.
• You use them to guide your design.
• Capture user characteristics
• Not real people, but synthesized from real user characteristics
• Should not be idealized
• Bring them to life with a name, characteristics, goals, personal
background
• Develop multiple personas
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Sarah Red is 24 years old and works as a web-designer at Zurich Insurance.
Sarah has a BA in three dimensional design from Middlesex University and an
M.A. in computer related design from the Royal College of Art in London. She
has worked for Zurich for the past two years and quite openly dislikes it.

Sarah is a talented designer who likes to experience the latest technology and
has won several prizes for her design. Yet, in her job she has to be very
conservative. She prepares forms for on-line quotes and provides general
information about the company to their web-customer.

Sarah dreams of joining a designer studio in London where she could fulfil her
talent. The current position, although boring, offers a good salary and the
possibility of living in London where . she can search for her dream job.

Sarah works in the web-development team. Her new boss is Elisabeth, a software engineer who
does not understand the user experience and is more concerned with technical details than with
design. Sarah is reasonably free in her job, as nobody seems to care.

Sarah’s been told that the company has adopted edge Connect and that her group will start using it
by next month. Sarah is worried about this decision: she thinks it is going to kill creativity and to
make her job even more boring. She has been told that she will be in charge of designing a
template layout for the car sector, and she wished she could use flash. She welcomes anyway the
idea of a change and a training course sounds interesting.
Thursday, January 51
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 Scenarios
• Key technique in interaction system design
• Iterative tools to be used throughout the design Process
• User stories = informal narrative description
which reports about user tasks and activities.
– Short snippets which tend to focus on the
user needs and motivations to perform a task rather than
on the use of a technology.

Thursday, January 52
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The summer term has just started and Fritz, a computer science student at the
Technische Universität Dresden, has decided to attend a course on "User
Interface generation for Web Services”. He logs in the University portal and
accesses an overview of all lectures, sport and language courses. He tries to
subscribe to the UI course but the system indicates a timetabling conflict with the
course on ‘Service-oriented Architecture” he previously registered to. Fritz sign
in an Italian course, which is automatically displayed in his personal weekly
calendar.

• Fritz wonders whether he should change his study plan to accommodate for the
UI course. Thus he decides to ask other students’ opinion. He joins a chat room,
but nobody is there. Fritz waits for other students while working on an
assignment
using the library service.

• Looking at the watch on the portal, he realizes that he has only 30 minutes
before a date with a girl met at the University online social network. Fritz
switches on his PDA and logs into the university portal while boarding the tram.
A beep indicates that some students have joined the chat room and after a short
negotiation he manages to swap his place from the “Service-oriented
Thursday, January 53
Architecture” course with a place in the User Interface course27, 2022 with another
student. The system is automatically updated, just in time for his date.
 HCI in the Software Process

 Software engineering and the design process for

interactive systems
 Usability engineering
 Iterative design and prototyping
 Design rationale

Thursday, January 54
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 HCI in the Software Process…

The software lifecycle

• Software engineering is the discipline for
understanding the software design process, or life
cycle
• Designing for usability occurs at all stages of the life
cycle, not as a single isolated activity.

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 SDLC Model
• A framework that describes the activities
performed at each stage of a software development
project.

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The waterfall model

• Requirements – defines needed

information, function, behavior,
performance and interfaces.
• Design – data structures, software
architecture, interface
representations, algorithmic
details.
• Implementation – source code,
database, user documentation,
testing.
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 When to use the Waterfall
Model
• Requirements are very well known
• Product definition is stable
• Technology is understood
• New version of an existing product
• Porting an existing product to a new
platform.

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 Verification and validation

• Verification designing the product right

Validation designing the right product .
• The formality gap validation will always rely to
some extent on subjective means of proof
Management and contractual issues design in
commercial and legal contexts .

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The spiral lifecycle model

• Adds risk analysis, and

4gl RAD prototyping to
the waterfall model
• Each cycle involves the
same sequence of steps
as the waterfall process
model
 When to use Spiral Model
• When creation of a prototype is appropriate
• When costs and risk evaluation is important
• For medium to high-risk projects
• Long-term project commitment unwise because of
potential changes to economic priorities
• Users are unsure of their needs
• Requirements are complex
• New product line
• Significant changes are expected (research and
exploration)
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 Rapid Application Model (RAD)

• Requirements planning phase (a workshop utilizing

structured discussion of business problems)
• User description phase – automated tools capture
information from users
• Construction phase – productivity tools, such as code
generators, screen generators, etc. inside a time-box.
(“Do until done”)
• Cutover phase -- installation of the system, user
acceptance testing and user training
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 A basic RAD (Rapid Applications
Development) lifecycle model
Project set-up

JAD workshops

Iterative design
and build

Engineer and
test final prototype

Implementation
review
 Rapid Application Development (RAD)

Rapid Application Development (RAD) is a development model

prioritizes rapid prototyping and quick feedback over long drawn out
development and testing cycles. With rapid application development,
developers can make multiple iterations and updates to a software rapidly
without needing to start a development schedule from scratch each time

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 When to use RAD
• Reasonably well-known requirements
• User involved throughout the life cycle
• Project can be time-boxed
• Functionality delivered in increments
• High performance not required
• Low technical risks
• System can be modularized
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 The Star Lifecycle Model

• Important features:
• Derived from some empirical work of interface designers
• No particular ordering of activities
• Evaluation is central to this model

Note: The Star Life Cycle Design Approach is centered around

evaluation and does not specify any order to the activities
surrounding this evaluation. It strongly encourages a high level
of iteration throughout the design process.
 The Star Model

task/functional
Implementation
analysis

Requirements
Prototyping Evaluation specification

Conceptual/
formal design
 Agile SDLC’s
• Speed up or bypass one or more life cycle phases
• Usually less formal and reduced scope
• Used for time-critical applications
• Used in organizations that employ disciplined methods

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 Agile software development

• Agile software development refers to  software development

methodologies centered round the idea of iterative
development, where requirements and solutions evolve
through collaboration between self-organizing cross-
functional teams.
• The ultimate value in Agile development is that it enables
teams to deliver value faster, with greater quality and
predictability, and greater aptitude to respond to change.
• Scrum and Kanban are two of the most widely used Agile
methodologies
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 Agile ..
• In software development, agile practices involve
discovering requirements and developing solutions
through the collaborative effort of self-organizing
and cross-functional teams and their customer/end
user.

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 Agile..

• Did you know that Agile can also be applied to

hardware projects?

Thursday, January 71
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Devops

Thursday, January 72
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Deveops :

Thursday, January 73
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 Waterfall Vs Agile
• Some of the distinct differences are: Agile is an
incremental and iterative approach; Waterfall is a
linear and sequential approach. Agile separates a
project into sprints; Waterfall divides a project
into phases. Agile helps complete many small
projects; Waterfall helps complete one single
project.

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 Agile Model Vs Waterfall Model

Agile Model Waterfall Model

Agile methodology definition: Agile Waterfall Model: Development of the
methodologies propose incremental software flows sequentially from start
and iterative approach to software point to end point.
design

The Agile process in software The design process is not broken into

engineering is broken into an individual models
individual models that designers
work on

The customer has early and frequent The customer can only see the product
opportunities to look at the product at the end of the project
and make decision and changes to
the project

Thursday, January 75
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 Difference b/n Agile vs
Waterfall
Agile Waterfall

Agile model is considered Waterfall model are more secure

unstructured compared to the because they are so plan oriented
waterfall model

•Small projects can be •All sorts of project can be estimated

implemented very quickly. For and completed.
large projects, it is difficult to
estimate the development
time.
•Error can be fixed in the •Only at the end, the whole product
middle of the project. is tested. If the requirement error
Thursday, Januaryis 76
found or any changes have to be
27, 2022

made, the project has to start from

 Usability engineering

• The ultimate test of usability based on measurement of user

experience .
• Usability engineering demands that specific usability measures be
made explicit as requirements.
• Usability specification
– usability attribute/principle
– measuring concept
– measuring method
– now level/ worst case/ planned level/ best case

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 Usability…

• Problems
– usability specification requires level of detail that
may not be
– possible early in design satisfying a usability
specification
– does not necessarily satisfy usability

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 ISO usability standard 9241

Adopts traditional usability categories:

• effectiveness
– can you achieve what you want to?
• efficiency
– can you do it without wasting effort?
• satisfaction
– do you enjoy the process?

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 Iterative design and prototyping
 Iterative design overcomes inherent problems of incomplete requirements
 Prototypes
– simulate or animate some features of intended system
– different types of prototype
• throw-away
• incremental
• evolutionary
 Management issues
– time
– planning
– non-functional features
– contracts

Thursday, January 80
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 Techniques for prototyping

• Storyboards
=need not be computer-based can be animated
• Limited functionality simulations
=some part of system functionality provided by designers tools
like HyperCard are common for these Wizard of Oz technique .
• Warning about iterative design
=design inertia – early bad decisions stay bad diagnosing real
usability problems in prototypes…. …. and not just the symptoms

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 Summary

• The software engineering life cycle

– distinct activities and the consequences for
interactive system design
Usability engineering
– making usability measurements explicit as
requirements
Iterative design and prototyping
– limited functionality simulations and animations

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 Summary …

Three key characteristics of the interaction

design process
• Focus on users
• Specific usability and user experience goals
• Iteration

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 Home work

• 1. agile frameworks like Scrum , Kanban , Xp and

what is its manifesto ?
• 2. How can design rationale benefit interface
design and why might it be rejected by
design teams?
• 3. Understand DevOp with regard to agile
philology

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Questions???
Thank You