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Chapter 5
Interaction Design and HCI in the Software Process

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2 Outline

 Interaction Design
 Process of interaction design
 HCI in software Process

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Interaction design is about developing high quality

interactive systems and products that support, enhance, and
extend the way people work, communicate, and interact

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What is Design?
Achieving goals within constraints:
 Goals : the purpose of the design we are intending to
produce
 Constraints: the limitations on the design process
by external factors
 Like materials, platforms, cost, time, health and
safety
 Trade-offs: choosing which goals or constraints can
be relaxed so that others can be met.

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5 Cont…
 The temptation is to focus on one or other
goal and optimize for this, then tweak the
design to make it just satisfy the
constraints and other goals.
 Instead, the best designs are where the
designer understands the trade-offs and
the factors affecting them.

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6 The golden rule of design

understand your materials

 understand computers
– limitations, capacities, tools, platforms
 understand people
– psychological, social aspects, human error.

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7 The process of design

 In other companies
 usability is seen as equivalent to testing – checking whether
people can use it and fixing problems, rather than making
sure they can from the beginning.
 In the best companies
 usability is designed in from the start.

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8

Interaction design process

scenarios
task analysis
what is guidelines
wanted principles
precise
analysis specification
what is there
vs.
design
what is
dialogue
wanted implement
notations
and deploy
evaluation
prototype
heuristics architectures
documentation
help

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9 Interaction Design Cont.

 Three key characteristics of the interaction design

process
 User focus
 Specific usability criteria
 Iteration

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10 User Focus

It is the way of identifying your users

 Who are they?
 Probably not like you!
 Talk to them
 Watch them
 Where they are going to use the product
 Kind of activities people are doing while interacting with the
product.

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11 Activity 1

 How does making of a phone call differs when using

 A public phone box
 A cell phone?

 How have these devices been designed to take in to account

 The kind of the users
 Type of activities
 Context of use

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12 User focus Cont.

 Gather as much information as possible about the future users

of the system.
 Stakeholders: people affected directly or indirectly by a
system.
 Participatory design: bringing a potential user fully into the
design process
 Persona: rich picture of an imaginary person who represents
your core user group.
 Cultural probes provide a way of gathering information
about people and their activities.
 Use your imagination.
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13 Scenarios
 are stories for design:rich stories of interaction.
 Some scenarios are quite short:
‘the user intends to press the “save” button, but accidentally
presses the “quit” button so loses his work’.
Explore the depth
 Explore interaction-what happens
 Explore cognition-what are the users thinking
 Explore architecture-what is happening inside
 scenarios are linear – they represent a single path
amongst all the potential interactions
 easy to understand
 But no alternatives 07/22/2022
14 Scenarios Cont.

Use scenarios to:

 Communicate with others-designers, clients, users
 It is easy to misunderstand each other whilst discussing abstract ideas.
 Express dynamics:what a system would look like
 Screenshots – appearance
 pictures – behaviour
 Validate other models-‘play’ it against other models ? [Read about
it from chapter 15:Dix]

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15 Cont…

 Scenarios are a resource that can be used and

reused throughout the design process:
 helping us see what is wanted,
 suggesting how users will deal with the potential
design
 checking that proposed implementations will work,
and generating test cases for final evaluation.

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17 cont…

 Navigation within the application You need to be able to

understand what will happen when a button is pressed, to
understand where you are in the interaction.
 Think about structure
 Local (single screen)-one screen or page out
 Global (whole site) - structure of site, movement
between screens

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HCI in Software Process

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HCI in the software process

software lifecycle
 activities that take place from the initial concept formation for a software
system up until its eventual phasing out and replacement.
 Distinct activities and the consequences for interactive system design
 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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26
The Waterfall Model
Requirements
specification

Architectural
design

Detailed
design

Coding and
unit testing

Integration
and testing

Operation and
maintenance

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 27 Activities in the Life Cycle

Requirements specification
Designer and customer try capture what the system is expected to provide can be
expressed in natural language or more precise languages, such as a task analysis
would provide.
Architectural design
 The next activities concentrate on how the system provides the services expected
from it.
 decomposition of the system into components
 which components provide which services
 interdependencies between separate components and the sharing of resource
 majority of these techniques are adequate for capturing the functional requirements of the
system – the services the system must provide in the work domain –but not non-functional
requirements.

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28 Cont…

 Detailed design
Refinement of architectural components and interrelations to
identify modules to be implemented separately
 Coding and unit testing
 Integration and testing
 Once enough components have been implemented and individually
tested, they must be integrated as described in the architectural
design.
 Further testing is done to ensure correct behavior and acceptable use
of any shared resources.
 Operation and maintenance

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29 Verification and Validation

Real-world
requirements
and constraints
The formality gap

 All of the requirements for an interactive system cannot be

determined from the start.
 Systems must be built and the interaction with users

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30 Cont..

 Throughout the life cycle, the design must be checked to ensure

that it both satisfies the high-level requirements agreed with the
customer and is also complete and internally consistent.
 Boehm Characterizing validation as designing ‘the right thing’
and verification as designing ‘the thing right’.

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31 Usability Engineering

 IS Usability
 quality of a system that makes it
 easy to learn,
 easy to use and
 encourages the user to regard the system as a positive help in
getting the job done
 Usability of an Interactive system is largely reflects the degree to which
the characteristics and requirements of the intended users have been
incorporated in the design
 Usability engineering demands that specific usability measures be made
explicit as requirements.

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 32 Five quality dimensions:
 Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks
the first time they encounter the design?
 Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly
can they perform tasks?
 Memorability: When users return to the design after a period
of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?
 Errors: How many errors do users make, and how easily can
they recover from the errors?
 Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design

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33 Usability metrics

 measurement criteria which can be used to determine the

measuring method for a usability attribute

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 34 Usability Cont.

Problems with UE
 usability specification requires level of detail that may not be possible early in design
satisfying a usability specification
 Usability metrics rely on measurements of very specific user actions in very
specific situations
 UE alone cannot maximize product usability, so the designer must be able to
evaluate early prototypes and rapidly correct features of the prototype

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