What to Design?

• Designing interactive products requires considering who is going to be using them, how they are going to be used, and where they are going to be used. Another key concern is to understand the kind of activities people are doing when interacting with the products. The appropriateness of different kinds of interfaces and arrangements of input and output devices depends on what kinds of activities are to be supported.
• The interface for everyday use is now predominantly digitally based. Although cost-effective, it puts the onus on the users to interact with the system. All this lead to a multitude of choices and decisions that interaction designers have to make for an ever-increasing range of products. A key question for interaction design is: how do you optimise the users’ interactions with a system, environment, or product, so that they support and extend the users’ activities in effective, useful, and usable ways?
  • Taking into account what people are good and bad at.
  • Considering what might help people with the way they currently do things.
  • Thinking through what might provide quality user experiences.
  • Listening to what people want and getting them involved in the design.
  • Using tried and tested user-based techniques during the design process.

What is Interaction Design

• By interaction design, we mean: designing interactive products to support the way people communicate and interact in their everyday and working lives.
• Put another way, it is about creating user experiences that enhance and augment the way people work, communicate, and interact.
• A central concern of interaction design is to develop interactive products that are usable. This is generally meant easy to learn, effective to use, and provide an enjoyable user experience.
• Interaction Design has cast its net much wider, being concerned with the theory, research, and practice of designing user experiences for all manner of technologies, systems, and products, whereas HCI has traditionally had a narrower focus, being “concerned with the design, evaluation, and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and with the study of major phenomena surrounding them”

The User Experience

• The user experience refers to how a product behaves and is used by people in the real world. Nielsen and Norman define it as encompassing “all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.” More specifically, it is about how people feel about a product and their pleasure and satisfaction when using it, looking at it, holding it, and opening or closing it.
• There are many aspects of the user experience that can be considered and ways of taking them into account when designing interactive products. Of central importance are the usability, the functionality, the aesthetics, the content, the look and feel, and the sensual and emotional appeal.

Understanding Users

• One main reason for having a better understanding of people in the contexts in which they live, work, and learn is that it can help designers understand how to design interactive products that provide good user experiences or match a user's needs, what works for one user group may be totally inappropriate for another.
• Learning more about people and what they do can also reveal incorrect assumptions that designers may have about particular user groups and what they need. For example, studies show that the elderly can be capable of interacting with standard-size information, and people tend not to be willing to be considered as lacking in cognitive and manual skills.
• Being aware of cultural differences is also an important concern for interaction design

Accessibility and Inclusiveness

• Accessibility refers to the extent to which an interactive product is accessible by as many people as possible. The focus is on people with disabilities.
• Inclusiveness means being fair, open, and equal to everyone. Inclusive design is an overarching approach where designers strive to make their products and services accommodate the widest possible number of people, e.g., regardless of disability, education, age or income.

Usability and User Experience Goals

• Usability refers to ensuring that interactive products are easy to learn, effective to use, and enjoyable from the user's perspective. It involves optimising the interactions people have with interactive products to enable them to carry out their activities at work, at school, and in their everyday lives. It can be broken down to:
  • 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).

Usability Goals

Usability goals are typically questions that provide the interaction designer with a concrete means of assessing various aspects of an interactive product, so that potential design problems and conflicts can be alerted. But a simple question like ‘is the system easy to learn’ is not helpful, instead, ask ‘How long will it take a user to find out most of the basic functions for a new smartwatch?’ The following are descriptions of the usability goals and a question for each one:

• Effectiveness is a general goal, and it refers to how good a product is at doing what it is supposed to do.
  • Q: Is the product capable of allowing people to learn, carry out their work efficiently, access the information they need, or buy the goods they want?
• Efficiency refers to the way a product supports users in carrying out their tasks. e.g., one-click purchase by Amazon
  • Q: Once users have learnt 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 situations. 1) external condition where people work: operator should be able to control X-ray machine. 2) help any one in any kind of situation: a) preventing serious error by reducing the risk of wrong key being mistakenly activated. b) provide various ways of recovery, such as ‘undo’. c) confirm dialogue.
  • Q: What is the range 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 product provides the right kind of functionality so that users can do what they need or want to do. Good: accounting software package that provides tools to calculate tax; Bad: drawing tools that does not allow to draw freehand.
  • Q: 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?
• Learnability refers to how easy a system is to learn to use. People don’t like to spend a lot of time learning how to use a system that for everyday use (e.g., GPS), or infrequently used (e.g., online tax form). They want to spend more time on those can provide a wider range of functionalities.
  • Q: Is it possible for 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 in this way?
• Memorability refers to how easy a product is to remember how to use, once learned. Important for infrequently used products. Help the user to remember the sequences, e.g., grouping relevant options.
  • Q: What kinds of interface support have been provided to help users remember how to carry out tasks, especially those use infrequently?

In addition to asking these questions, usability criteria are uses to assessed how to improve a user’s performance, e.g., time to complete a task (efficiency), time to learn a task (learnability), the number of errors made when carrying out a given task over time (memorability)

User Experience Goals

Experience goals has been articulated in the table:

• Subtle differences provide more options in subjective description. Although the meaning of some words overlaps, the subtle differences can provide different options in describing the same activity over different places, time and technology. e.g., listening to music in the shower is pleasurable, while it is more apt to describe listening to music in a car as enjoyable.
• The ‘flow’ The concepts can be furthered defined in terms of elements that contribute to making a user experience pleasurable, fun, exciting…, a popular concept, flow, refers to a state of intensive emotional involvement, e.g., you find the time flies when you are immersed in listening to the music. Therefore, a web ui design can follow the ‘flow’ concept, leading the user to unexpected places that making themselves absorbed.
• Micro-interactions The quality of user experience can also be improved by single actions performed at an interface, e.g., the perfect level of gliding resistance when turning a knob, or the sound of trash being emptied. Such micro-interactions are infrequently or small, but they can have a big impact on the user experience.

Designing to Persuade, Dark Patterns

The key to nudge people in subtle and pleasant ways with which they can trust and feel comfortable, a converse example is dark pattern:

Online shopping experiences are more about persuading people to buy rather than being designed to make shopping easy, e.g., advertising additional items such as insurance in a list of full tempting graphics when booking flights, or even worse: adding those items as default, the user has to deselect them. Such behaviours are described as dark patterns, which is “deception and dishonesty by design”

Design Principles

Design principles can help designers explain and improve their designs, they won’t specify how to design an actual interface, but to act more like triggers. The best-known design principles are concerned with how to determine what users should see and do when carrying out their tasks. Here we briefly describe the most common ones: visibility, feedback, constraints, consistency, and affordance.

• Visibility The more visible functions are, the more likely it is that users will be able to know what to do next.
• Feedback Feedback involves sending back information about what action has been done and what has been accomplished, allowing the user to continue with the activity. Deciding which combinations are appropriate is central, the right feedback can also provide visibility
• Constraints The concept of constraining refers to determining ways of restricting the kinds of user interactions that can take place at a given time, so that it prevents the user from making a mistake. A common design practice is to deactivate the menu option by shading them grey.
• Consistency This refers to designing interfaces to have similar operations and use similar elements for achieving similar tasks, e.g., using the same input action to highlight an object. One of the benefits is that they are easy to learn and use. However, it can be problematic to apply such a concept to more complex interfaces.
• Affordance This term refers to an attribute of an object that allows people to know how to use it, the more obvious the affordance of a physical object are, the easier the user can know how to use it. e.g., a door handle affords pulling.

In practice, the challenge of applying more than one design principles is the trade-offs. e.g., the more you try to constrain an interface, the less visible becomes. Good interaction design involves getting the right balance. e.g., for a website design, simplicity is important, but the graphics, shading… make it aesthetically pleasing, so the balance between aesthetic appeal and the optimal amount and kind of information is important.

Summary

In this chapter, we have looked at what interaction design is and its importance when developing apps, products, services, and systems. To begin, a number of good and bad designs were presented to illustrate how interaction design can make a difference. We described who and what is involved in interaction design and the need to understand accessibility and inclusiveness. We explained in detail what usability and user experience are, how they have been characterised, and how to operationalise them to assess the quality of a user experience resulting from interacting with an interactive product. The increasing emphasis on designing for the user experience and not just products that are usable was stressed. A number of core design principles were also introduced that provide guidance for helping to inform the interaction design process.

Key Points

• Interaction design is concerned with designing interactive products to support the way people communicate and interact in their everyday and working lives.
• Interaction design is multidisciplinary, involving many inputs from wide-ranging disciplines and fields.
• The notion of the user experience is central to interaction design.
• Optimising the interaction between users and interactive products requires consideration of a number of interdependent factors, including the context of use, types of activity, UX goals, accessibility, cultural differences, and user groups.
• Identifying and specifying relevant usability and user experience goals can help lead to the design of good interactive products.
• Design principles, such as feedback and simplicity, are useful heuristics for informing, analysing, and evaluating aspects of an interactive product.