What is Involved in Interaction Design: introduction

Commonalities of the field of design:

• Discover: Designers try to gather insights about the problem
• Define: Designers develop a clear brief that frames the design challenge
• Develop: Solutions or concepts are created, prototyped, tested, and iterated
• Deliver: The resulting project is finalised, produced and launched

Interaction design focuses attention on users and their goals, which means the users’ concerns direct the development rather than just technical concerns.

Design is about trade-offs — balancing conflicting requirements, it usually depends on the purpose of the system.

Generating alternatives is a key principle in most design disciplines, “the best way to get a good idea is to get lost of ideas”, however, generating lots of ideas is not necessarily hard, the difficult part is how to choose from them.

Involving users in the design process requires the design to be captured and expressed in a form that allows review, revision, and improvement. One simple approach is to produce a series of sketches. Others include: descriptions in natural language, building a prototype, or more effectively, a combination of them. Since users are unlikely to understand jargon or specialist notations, an interactive prototype is very powerful.

Understanding the Problem Space

• Deciding what to design is key, and exploring the problem space is one way in which to decide. e.g., whether to use multitouch, voice, GUI…,
• Although it is necessary to choose which technology to employ and decide how to design the physical aspects at some point, it is better to make such decisions after articulating the nature of the problem space, by understanding the current user experience or product, why a change is needed and how this change will improve the user experience.
• The process of articulating the problem space is usually done as a team effort, so time-consuming and disagreements are inevitable, but the benefits of this can far outweigh such costs: minimising the chance of incorrect assumptions and unsupported claims creeping into the design solution that later turns out to be unusable or unwanted.
• Spending time enumerating and reflecting upon ideas during the early stages of the design process enables more options to consider, and designers are expected to justify their choice of problems and to be able to present clearly and convincingly their rationale in business and design language.
• Being able to think and analyse, present, and argue is valued as much as the ability to create a product.

Four Approaches to Interaction Design

• User-Centred Design: the users guide the designer, the designer’s role is to translate the users’ needs and goals.
• Activity-Centred Design: It focuses on the behaviour surrounding particular tasks, users still play a significant role, but it is their behaviour rather than their goals/needs that important
• System-Centred Design: a structured, rigorous, and holistic design approach that focuses on context, particularly appropriate for complex problems. It is the system (the people, computers, objects, …) that the centre of attention, users are set to the goals of the system
• Genius Design: or rapid expert design, it relies on the experience and flair of the designer, user’s role is to validate the ideas generated by designer

The Importance of Involving Users

• The best way to ensure the developers gain a good understanding of uses’ goals is to involve target users throughout the development, other two aspects are equally important: expectation management and ownership.
  • Expectation management is the process of making sure that the users’ expectations are realistic, which means there are no surprises for the user when the product arrives. Disappointment from a hyped advertisement is a kind of feeling that EM tries to avoid.
• Involving users throughout development helps with the EM because they can see the product’s capabilities from an early stage and understand how and why its features affect their jobs or lives. Adequate and timely training is another technique for EM.
• The second reason for user involvement is ownership, which helps the user feel that they have contributed to a product’s development and are more likely to feel the sense of ownership and support its use.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

User involvement is undoubtedly beneficial, but the levels and types of involvement requires careful consideration and balance. Listed research foundigns can be found on the page 45.

Degrees of User Involvement

• Different degrees of user involvement are possible, from fully engaged throughout all iterations to targeted participation in a specific event, from a small group of individual users in face-to-face context to hundreds of potential users online.
• Full-time involvement means that they may be out of touch with the user community but the input is available throughout the development, while part-time means that they can take part in specific activities once available, but it might result in high work-load, and the input is limited to such particular activities.
• Initially, small groups in face-to-face contexts is popular, but the online feedback exchange (OFE) is increasingly used nowadays. Design is becoming more participative through crowdsourcing, where a range of different people are participating and contributing, the bringing of different perspectives enhances the design itself and produces more user satisfaction.
• Participatory design, or cooperative design, or co-design, instead of passively receiving ideas, it puts end users and stakeholders in active positions in the design process. More details in Chapter 12.
• The individual circumstances of the project affect what is realistic and appropriate, e.g., if the user group is identifiable, say for a particular company, it’s easier to involve them, but if the product is for the open market, targeted activities and OFE may be more appropriate, e.g., online A/B testing.

User Involvement after Product Release

The prevalence of customers reviews has grown considerably and these far-ranging feedback provides significant implications for popularity and success of a product. A typical form is Error Reporting System (EPS), or online crashing analysis, that automatically collect information from users to improve the applications, e.g., Windows error reporting system,.

What is a User-Centred Approach?

When the field of HCI was being established, three principles would lead to “useful and easy to use computer systems” laid down are:

1. Early focus on users and tasks: first understand users by studying their cognitive, behavioural, anthropomorphic, and attitudinal characteristics. This requires observing them doing their normal tasks, studying the nature of those tasks, and involving users in the design process.
2. Empirical measurement: the reactions and performance of intended users to printed scenarios, manuals, are observed and measured, then their performance when interacting with prototypes are observed recorded, and analysed.
3. Iterative design: When problems are found in user testing, they are fixed, and more tests are carried out. This means the design and development are iterative, with cycles of design-test-measure-redesign being repeated as often as necessary.

More details about these three principles:

• Early Focus on Users and Tasks:

  1. Users’ tasks and goals are the driving force behind the development.

     While technically can inform design and option, it is not the driving force. Instead of saying: where can we deploy this new technology, say: what technologies are available to better support users’ goals?

  2. Users’ behaviour and context of use are studied, and the system is designed to support them.

     This is not just about capturing users’ tasks and goals, how people perform their tasks is so important. Understanding behaviour highlights priorities, preferences and implicit intentions.

  3. Users’ characteristics are captured and designed for.

     People are prone to making errors and have certain limitations, such as colour blindness. The product should take these limitations into consideration to prevent tasks from being made. More details in Chapter 4.

  4. Users are consulted throughout development from the earliest phases to the latest.

     There are different levels of user involvement and different ways in which to consult users.

  5. All design decisions are taken within the context of the users, their abilities, and the environment.

     It does not necessarily mean that users are actively involved in the design decisions, but it’s one option.

• Empirical Measurement Specific usability and UX goals should be identified, documented, and agreed upon at the beginning of the project to help designers choose between alternative designs and check progress. i.e., the product can be evaluated empirically at regular stages throughout the development.
• Iterative Design Iteration allows designs to be refined based on feedback, no matter how good the designers are and how clear the users may think their vision is of the required artefact, ideas will need to be revised in light of feedback. This is particularly true for innovation, because innovation rarely emerges whole and ready to go. Iteration is inevitable because designers never get the solution right for the first time.

Four Basic Activities of Interaction Design

The four basic activities for interaction design are as follows:

1. Discovering requirements for the interactive product.
2. Designing alternatives that meet those requirements.
3. Prototyping the alternative designs so that they can be communicated and assessed
4. Evaluating the product and the user experience it offers throughout the process.

Discovering Requirements

The left side of the double diamond of design. It includes understanding the target users, and the support a product can provide. This understanding is gleaned through data gathering and analysis (Chapter 8-10). It forms the basis of the product’s requirements and underpins subsequent design and development. The requirement activity is discussed in Chapter 11.

Designing Alternatives

The core activity of designing and is part of the Develop phase. For interaction Design, it can be divided into Conceptual Design (Chapter 3) and Concrete Design. Conceptual design involves creating a conceptual model for the product, which describes an abstraction outlining what people can do and how to interact with the product. Concrete design involves details of the product, e.g., the colours, sounds…

Prototyping

Part of the Develop phase, it does not necessarily mean that a software is required, e.g., paper-based prototypes are quick and cheap to identify problems at early stages. More details in Chapter 12.

Evaluating

Part of the Develop phase, it is the process of determining the usability and acceptability of the product based on a series of criteria. The evaluation does not replace QA and testing, but complements and enhances them. Details in Chapters 14-16.

A Simple Lifecycle Model for Interaction Design

Some Practical Issues

Who Are the users?

Identifying users seems easy, but it can be harder than what you think. Because most products are designed for a large section of people, so it’s hard to give a clean description. Another surprisingly wide collection of people are stockholders, who can influence or be influenced by the success or failure of the product. Be careful about the changes that can affect stakeholders without returning something tangible in its place. Stakeholders can be larger than the users in some cases, e.g., customers who pay for it, developers, legislators… Identifying stakeholders helps to decide who to involve as users and to what degree.

What Are the Users’ Needs?

Determining what product to build is not simply a question of asking people “What do you need” then supplying it, because the user may not know what is possible. Instead, exploring the problem space, investigating the users and activities to see what can be improved, or trying out ideas with potential users to see whether these ideas are successful. Designers’ ideas may not necessarily coincide with the target users, and it is more promising to focus on the people’s goals rather than simply expecting stakeholders’ articulation.

How to Generate Alternative Designs

One answer is that they come from the individual designer’s flair and creativity. Innovation often arises through cross-fertilisation of ideas from different perspectives, individuals, and contexts. Cross-fertilisations may result from discussing ideas with other designers, while creativity is often wrapped in mystique, but a lot process and how creativity can be enhanced has been uncovered, e.g., browsing a collection of designs will inspire the designer to consider alternative perspectives and hence alternative solutions, alternatively, ran creativity workshop. (details on the book)

A more pragmatic answer, then, is seeking different perspectives and looking at other designs. e.g., competition’s products, earlier versions of similar system…

An alternative design is limited in some cases, because the design is a process of balancing constraints and trading off requirements with another, e.g., designing a software under Windows may conform to the Windows look and feel to keep consistency.

How to Choose Among Alternative Designs

Broadly speaking, the decisions fall into two categories: one of them is about externally visible and measurable features, and the other is about characteristics internal to the system that cannot be observed or measured without dissecting it. e.g., a photocopier, one of them is about the physical size, speed and quality, the other one is about the choice of materials used may depend on its friction rating and how much it deforms under certain conditions. For interaction design, the UX is the driving force, so externally visible and measurable behaviour is the main focus.

One answer is letting users and stakeholders interact with them and discussing their experiences, preferences, and suggestion for improvement. Prototypes can help users understand the product to generate their thought (facilitating user feedback). Another way is to use A/B test, common for web design.

Another answer is quality, but this requires a clear understanding of what quality means. However, different people have different views of quality, so capturing different views clearly can clarify expectations, provide a benchmark against which products and prototypes can be compared, and form the basis on which to choose among alternatives.

How to Integrate ID Activities Within Other Lifecycle Models

Typical integration is related to agile software development, more details on the book.

Summary

In this chapter, we looked at the user-centred design and the process of interaction design. That is, what is user-centred design, what activities are required in order to design an interactive product, and how are these activities related? A simple interaction design lifecycle model consisting of four activities was introduced, and issues surrounding the involvement and identification of users, generating alternative designs, evaluating designs, and integrating user-centred concerns with other lifecycles were discussed.

key points:

• Different design disciplines follow different approaches, but they have commonalities that are captured in the double diamond of design.
• It is important to have a good understanding of the problem space before trying to build anything.
• The interaction design process consists of four basic activities: discover requirements, design alternatives that meet those requirements, prototype the designs so that they can be communicated and assessed, and evaluate them.
• The user-centred design rests on three principles: early focus on users and tasks, empirical measurement, and iterative design. These principles are also key for interaction design.
• Involving users in the design process assists with expectation management and feelings of ownership, but how and when to involve users requires careful planning.
• There are many ways to understand who users are and what their goals are in using a product, including rapid iterations of working prototypes.
• Looking at others' designs and involving other people in design provides useful inspiration and encourages designers to consider alternative design solutions, which is key to effective design.
• Usability criteria, technical feasibility, and users' feedback on prototypes can all be used to choose among alternatives.
• Prototyping is a useful technique for facilitating user feedback on designs at all stages.
• Interaction design activities are becoming better integrated with lifecycle models from other related disciplines such as software engineering.