Lect 4

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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 Interaction Design
What is interaction design?

•Designing interactive products to support people in their

everyday and working lives; Sharp, Rogers and Preece
(2002).

•It is concerned with how the human use the computer as a

tool to perform, simplify and support a task.

Goals of interaction Design:

•To develop usable products. Usability means easy to learn,
effective to use and provide an enjoyable experience and
involve users in the design process.
 What is Design
Achieving goals within constraints
• goals - purpose
– who is it for, why do they want it
• constraints
– materials, platforms
• trade-offs
• Need to take into account:
– Who the users are
– What activities are being carried out
– Where the interaction is taking place
• Need to optimise the interactions users have with a
product such that they match the users activities and
needs

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 Goals of interaction design
• Develop usable products
– Usability means easy to learn, effective to use and
provide an enjoyable experience
• Involve users in the design process
• Concerned with design of spaces for human
communication and interaction. It addresses:
– Design-what it is, interventions, goals, constraints
– the design process- what happens when
– Users -who they are, what they are like …
– Scenarios -rich stories of design
– Navigation - finding your way around a system
– iteration and prototypes - never get it right first time!
 Core characteristics of interaction
design
• users should be involved throughout the
development of the system project
• specific usability and user experience goals need
to be identified, clearly documented and agreed at
the beginning of the project
• iteration is needed through the core activities
• Evaluate throughout

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 What is involved in the process of
interaction design
• Conduct Contextual research- domain analysis, task, user
analysis, physical environment, technological, business and
organisational analysis.
• Develop a conceptual model - what to do and how to decide
• Users develop a mental model
• Identify needs and establish requirements- what is there and what
is wanted …
• Develop alternative designs
• Build interactive prototypes that can be communicated and
assessed - iteration and prototyping
– getting it right … and finding what is really needed!
• implementation and deployment making it and getting it out there
• Evaluate what is being built throughout the process

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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

– What do you want to create?

– What are your assumptions?

– Will it achieve what you hope it will?

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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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 A framework for analysing the
problem space
• 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 are designing for a new user experience how
do you think your proposed design ideas support,
change, or extend current ways of doing things?

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 From problem space to design
space
• Having a good understanding of the problem space can
help inform the design space
– e.g. what kind of interface, behavior, functionality to
provide

• But before deciding upon these it is important to develop

a conceptual model

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 Importance of involving users
Expectation management
• Ensure realistic expectations
• Ensures there are no surprises when the software is delivered
• Important when a new system is being introduced that changes
existing work practices No surprises, no disappointments
• Timely training
• Communication, but no hype

Ownership
• Feel they have a stake in the product which may help with
acceptance.
• 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 design (UCD) is a design philosophy
and a process in which the needs, wants and
limitations of the end user of an interface or document
are given extensive attention at each stage of the
design process. It 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
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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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