2 Understanding and ConceptualizingInteraction

2 Understanding and ConceptualizingInteraction

1. Imagine you have been asked to design an application to enable people to share their photos, movies, music, chats, documents, and so on in an efficient, safe, and enjoyable way . What would you do? How would you start? Would you begin by sketching out how the interface might look, work out how the system architecture should be structured, or start coding? Or, would you start by asking users about their current experiences of sharing files and look at existing tools, e.g. Dropbox, and, based on this, begin thinking about why and how you were going to design the application?

2. Understanding the Problem Space and Conceptualizing Interaction

   • Explicating people's assumptions and claims about why they think something might be a good idea (or not) enables the design team as a whole to view multiple perspectives on the problem space and, in so doing, reveal conflicting and problematic ones. The following framework is intended to provide a set of core questions to aid design teams in this process: 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 have not identified any problems and instead are designing for a new user experience, how do you think your proposed design ideas support, change, or extend current ways of doing things?
     • Having a good understanding of the problem space greatly helps design teams to then be able to conceptualize the design space. Primarily this involves articulating the proposed system and the user experience. The benefits of conceptualizing the design space early on are: Orientation – enabling the design team to ask specific kinds of questions about how the conceptual model will be understood by the targeted users. Open-mindedness – preventing the design team from becoming narrowly focused early on. Common ground – allowing the design team to establish a set of common terms that all can understand and agree upon, reducing the chance of misunderstandings and confusion arising later on.
   • In the process of creating an interactive product, it can be tempting to begin at the nuts and bolts level of design. By this we mean working out how to design the physical interface and what technologies and interaction styles to use, e.g. whether to use multitouch, speech, graphical user interface, head-up display , augmented reality , gesture-based, etc.

3. Conceptual Models

   • a conceptual model provides a working strategy and a framework of general concepts and their interrelations. The core components are: Metaphors and analogies that convey to people how to understand what a product is for and how to use it for an activity (e.g. browsing, bookmarking). The concepts that people are exposed to through the product, including the task–domain objects they create and manipulate, their attributes, and the operations that can be performed on them (e.g. saving, revisiting, organizing). The relationships between those concepts (e.g. whether one object contains another, the relative importance of actions to others, and whether an object is part of another). The mappings between the concepts and the user experience the product is designed to support or invoke (e.g. one can revisit through looking at a list of visited sites, most-frequently visited, or saved websites).
     • The best conceptual models are those that appear obvious; the operations they support being intuitive to use. However, sometimes applications can end up being based on overly complex conceptual models, especially if they are the result of a series of upgrades, where more and more functions and ways of doing something are added to the original conceptual model. Whereas in the first version of the software there may have been one way of doing something, later versions are often designed to allow several ways of performing the same operation.
       • Most interface applications are actually based on well-established conceptual models. For example, a conceptual model based on the core aspects of the customer experience when at a shopping mall underlies most online shopping websites.

4. Interface Metaphors

   • More specifically , an interface metaphor is one that is instantiated in some way as part of the user interface: for example, the desktop metaphor. Another well-known one is the search engine. This term was originally coined in the early 1990s to refer to a software tool that indexed and retrieved files remotely from the Internet, using various algorithms to match terms selected by the user. The metaphor invites comparisons between a mechanical engine, which has several parts working, and the everyday action of looking in different places to find something.

5. Interaction Types

   • Below we describe in more detail each of the four types of interaction. It should be noted that they are not meant to be mutually exclusive (e.g. someone can interact with a system based on different kinds of activities); nor are they meant to be definitive. 1. Instructing – where users issue instructions to a system. This can be done in a number of ways, including: typing in commands, selecting options from menus in a windows environment or on a multitouch screen, speaking aloud commands, gesturing, pressing buttons, or using a combination of function keys. 2. Conversing – where users have a dialog with a system. Users can speak via an interface or type in questions to which the system replies via text or speech output. 3. Manipulating – where users interact with objects in a virtual or physical space by manipulating them (e.g. opening, holding, closing, placing). Users can hone their familiar knowledge of how to interact with objects.
     • 4. Exploring – where users move through a virtual environment or a physical space. Virtual environments include 3D worlds, and augmented and virtual reality systems. They enable users to hone their familiar knowledge of physically moving around. Physical spaces that use sensor-based technologies include smart rooms and ambient environments, also enabling people to capitalize on familiarity

6. Paradigms, Visions, Theories, Models, and Frameworks

   • Other sources of inspiration and knowledge that are used to inform design and guide research are paradigms, visions, theories, models, and frameworks (Carroll, 2003).
     • 1 Paradigms To follow a particular paradigm means adopting a set of practices that a community has agreed upon. These include: the questions to be asked and how they should be framed; the phenomena to be observed; the way in which findings from studies are to be analyzed and interpreted (Kuhn, 1972).
       • 2 Visions Visions of the future are another driving force that frame research and development in interaction design. A number of tech companies have produced videos about the future of technology and society , inviting audiences to imagine what life will be like in 10, 15, or 20 years’ time.
         • Many new challenges, themes, and questions have been articulated through these visions (e.g. Rogers, 2006; Harper et al, 2008), including: How to enable people to access and interact with information in their work, social, and everyday lives, using an assortment of technologies. How to design user experiences for people using interfaces that are part of the environment but where there are no obvious controlling devices. How and in what form to provide contextually relevant information to people at appropriate times and places to support them while on the move. How to ensure that information that is passed around via interconnected displays, devices, and objects is secure and trustworthy .
           • 3 Theories Over the past 30 years, numerous theories have been imported into human–computer interaction, providing a means of analyzing and predicting the performance of users carrying out tasks for specific kinds of computer interfaces and systems (Rogers, 2012). These have been primarily cognitive, social, and organizational in origin.
             • 4 Models Models are typically abstracted from a theory coming from a contributing discipline, like psychology , that can be directly applied to interaction design. For example, Norman (1988) developed a number of models of user interaction based on theories of cognitive processing, arising out of cognitive science, that were intended to explain the way users interacted with interactive technologies. These include the seven stages of action model that describes how users move from their plans to executing physical actions they need to perform to achieve them, to evaluating the outcome of their actions with respect to their goals.
             • 5 Frameworks Numerous frameworks have been introduced in interaction design to help designers constrain and scope the user experience for which they are designing. In contrast to a model – which is a simplification of a phenomenon – a framework offers advice to designers as to what to design or look for.
               • This can come in a variety of forms, including steps, questions, concepts, challenges, principles, tactics, and dimensions. Frameworks, like models, have traditionally been based on theories of human behavior, but they are increasingly being developed from the experiences of actual design practice and the findings arising from user studies.
                 • The designer's model – the model the designer has of how the system should work. The system image – how the system actually works is portrayed to the user through the interface, manuals, help facilities, and so on. The user's model – how the user understands how the system works.