Professional Documents
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Lecture 08
1
The process of interaction
design
Overview
• What is involved in Interaction Design?
– Importance of involving users
– Degrees of user involvement
– What is a user-centered approach?
– Four basic activities
• It is a representation:
– a plan for development
– a set of alternatives
and successive
elaborations
What is interaction design
about?
• In interaction design, we investigate
the artifact's use and target domain by
a
taking user-centered approach to
development. This means that users'
concerns direct the development rather
than technical concerns.
• Design is also about trade-offs,
about
balancing conflicting requirements.
Activity
• Imagine that you want to design an electronic
calendar or diary for yourself. You might use this
system to plan your time, record meetings and
appointments, mark down people's birthdays, and so
on, basically the kinds of things you might do with a
paper-based calendar.
– 4. Evaluating designs
Identifying needs and
establishing requirements
• In order to design something to support
people, we must know who our target
users are and what kind of support an
interactive product could usefully provide.
• Suppliers
• Local shop
owners
Customers
Managers and owners
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 booth
— strength - a child’s toy requires little strength to
operate,
but greater strength to change batteries
— disabilities(e.g. sight, hearing, deftness)
What are ‘needs’?
• Users rarely know what is possible
• Users can’t tell you what they ‘need’ to help
them achieve their goals
• Instead, 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 behaviour
– can be described as future scenarios
Where do alternatives
come from?
• Humans stick to what they know works
• But 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
IDEO TechBox
• The Box, which is a combination parts
materials
Tech library,
and database and website, and
organizational memory. It allows IDEO to archive its
wide array of experience gained from work across many
industries and share it across all studios in our
worldwide network.
• All major IDEO offices maintain a duplicate Tech Box,
each with its own supervisor who oversees the addition
of new materials, and most IDEO employees are
constantly on the lookout for likely candidates for
addition.
• Additionally, IDEO offers the Tech Box as part of its
innovation services, as its clients become increasingly
aware of the value of knowledge management
IDEO TechBox
• Each Tech Box has several drawers holding hundreds of
objects, from smart fabrics to elegant mechanisms to clever
toys, each of which are tagged and numbered.
• Designers and engineers can search through the
compartments, play with the items, and apply materials used
by other designers and engineers within the company to their
current project.
• The entire contents of the Tech Box are available on IDEO’s
intranet through a searchable website, with each item listing
its specifications, including manufacturer and price, and an
additional IDEO anecdote with designer and project info if
applicable. The Tech Box is a valuable resource that designers
and engineers use to gain inspiration, break out of a holding
pattern.
IDEO TechBox
• Library, database, website - all-in-one
• Contains physical gizmos for inspiration
From: www.ideo.com/
The TechBox
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 check
regularly
—safety: how safe?
—utility: which functions are superfluous?
—effectiveness: appropriate support? task
coverage, information available
—efficiency: performance measurements
Testing prototypes to choose
among alternatives
Life Cycle Models
“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t
know where you’re going, because you might
not get there.”
Yogi Berra
scenarios
what is
task analysis
wanted guidelines
• Important features:
—Evaluation at the centre of activities
—No particular ordering of activities; development
may start in any one
—Derived from empirical studies of
interface designers
The Star Model (Hartson and Hix, 1989)
The Star Model (Hartson and Hix, 1989)
• The one here is taken fromHartson and Hix
• Model came about by analysing how design takes
place in practice
• Evaluation is central: results of each activity are
evaluated before going onto next one
• both bottom-up and top -down required in
wavesvsoftware designers are familiar with this in
their work and call it ‘yo-yoing’
• it is important to do both structure and detail at
the same time
• in practice this is what is done - ?
The Star Model (Hartson and Hix,
1989)
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