Chapter 2: The process of interaction design (3720)

Chapter 2: The process of interaction design (3720)

1. This approach has four phases which are iterated:

   • • 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 finalized, produced, and launched.

2. 2.2 What Is Involved in Interaction Design?

   • user-centered approach to development
     • the designs and potential solutions will need to be communicated to people other than the original designer
       • to produce a series of sketches
       • to write a description in natural language
       • to build a prototype
   • Design is also about trade-offs—about balancing conflicting requirements.
   • Generating alternatives is a key principle
   • 2.2.1 Understanding the Problem Space
     • Deciding what to design is key
       • This starts at the user and not at the nuts and bolts
     • understanding what is currently the user experience or the product,why a change is needed, and how this change will improve the user experience
     • The process of articulating the problem space is typically done as a team effort
       • time-consuming and sometimes resulting in disagreements among the design team, the benefits of this process can far outweigh the associated costs
         • less chance of incorrect assumptions and unsupported claims
         • more options and possibilities to be considered
   • 2.2.2 The Importance of Involving Users
     • ensure that the end product is usable and that it indeed will be used
     • Product owner is common. The product owner’s job is to filter user and customer input to the development cycle and to prioritize requirements or features.
     • involve target users throughout development.
       • Expectation management
         • the process of making sure that the users’ expectations of the new product are realistic.
       • Ownership
         • Users who are involved and feel that they have contributed to a product’s development
   • 2.2.3 Degrees of User Involvement
     • fully engaged throughout all iterations of the development process
     • targeted participation in specific activities and from small groups of individual users in face-to-face contexts to hundreds of thousands of potential users and stakeholders online
     • individual users may be co-opted onto the design team so that they are major contributors to the development.
       • Cons
         • full-time involvement may mean that they become out of touch with their user community
         • part-time involvement might result in a high workload for them.
       • Pros
         • the input is available continually throughout development.
       • Participatory design, also sometimes referred to as cooperative design or co-design
   • 2.2.4 What Is a User-Centered Approach?
     • real users and their goals, not just technology, are the driving force behind product development.
     • three principles that they believed would lead to a “useful and easy to use computer system.”
       • 1. Early focus on users and tasks.
         • first understanding who the users will
         • observing users doing their normal tasks, studying the nature of those tasks, and then involving users in the design process.
         • 1. Users’ tasks and goals are the driving force behind the development
         • 2. Users’ behavior and context of use are studied, and the system is designed to support them
         • 3. Users’ characteristics are captured and designed for
         • 4. Users are consulted throughout development from earliest phases to the latest
         • 5. All design decisions are taken within the context of the users, their activities, and their environment.
       • 2. Empirical measurement
         • the reactions and performance of intended users to printed scenarios, manuals, and so forth, are observed and measured
         • interact with simulations and prototypes,
       • 3. Iterative design
         • When problems are found in user testing, they are fixed, and then more tests and observations are carried out
   • 2.2.5 Four Basic Activities of Interaction Design
     • 1. Discovering requirements for the interactive product
       • understanding the target users and the support an interactive product could usefully provide
       • data gathering and analysis
     • 2. Designing alternatives that meet those requirements.
       • proposing ideas for meeting the requirements.
         • part of the Develop phase
       • two subactivities:
         • conceptual design
           • a conceptual model describes an abstraction outlining what people can do with a product and what concepts are needed to understand how to interact with it.
         • concrete design
           • the detail of the product including the colors, sounds, and images to use, menu design, and icon design
     • 3. Prototyping the alternative designs so that they can be communicated and assessed.
       • part of the Develop phase
       • Allows users to interact with the proposed solution or part thereof
     • 4. Evaluating the product and the user experience it offers throughout the process.
       • part of the Develop phase
       • process of determining the usability and acceptability of the product or design measured in terms of a variety of usability and user-experience criteria.
       • does not replace activities concerned with quality assurance and testing
     • This is Iterative
   • 2.2.6 A Simple Lifecycle Model for Interaction Design
     • lifecycle model (or process model) is used to represent a model that captures a set of activities and how they are related.
     • two well-known ones are the Star (Hartson and Hix, 1989) and an international standard model ISO 9241-210
     • A sprint is divided into five phases, and each phase is completed in a day
     • Setting the Stage -> This time is used to choose the right design challenge, gather the right team, and organize the time and space to run the sprint
     • Unpack Day 1 focuses on making a map of the challenge and choosing a target, that is, a part of the challenge that can be achieved in a week.
     • Sketch Competing Solutions Day 2 focuses on generating solutions, with an emphasis on sketching and individual creativity rather than group brainstorming.
     • Decide on the Best Day 3 focuses on critiquing the solutions generated on Day 1, choosing the one most likely to meet the sprint’s challenge, and producing a storyboard.
     • Build a Realistic Prototype Day 4 focuses on turning the storyboard into a realistic prototype, that is, something on which customers can provide feedback
     • Build a Realistic Prototype Day 4 focuses on turning the storyboard into a realistic prototype, that is, something on which customers can provide feedback
     • Research in the wild (RITW) develops technology solutions in everyday living by creating and evaluating new technologies and experiences in situ.
     • observe how people react to technology and how they change and integrate it into their everyday lives
     • Technology: Concerned with appropriating existing infrastructures/devices (e.g., Internet of Things toolkit, mobile app) in situ or developing new ones for a given setting
     • Design: Covers the design space of an experience
     • In situ study: Concerned with evaluating in situ an existing device/tool/service
     • Theory: Investigating a theory, idea, concept or observation about a behavior,
     • RITW (Research in the wild)

3. 2.3 Some Practical Issues

   • • Who are the users?
     • Identifying the stakeholders for a project helps to decide who to involve as users and to what degree, but identifying relevant stakeholders can be tricky.
   • • What are the users’ needs?
     • people don’t necessarily know what is possible
     • exploring the problem space, investigating the users and their activities to see what can be improved
     • Focusing on people’s goals, usability goals and user experience goals is a more promising approach to interaction design than simply expecting stakeholders to be able to articulate the requirements for a product.
   • • How to generate alternative designs
     • Innovations often arise through cross-fertilization of ideas from different perspectives, individuals, and contexts; the evolution of an existing product through use and observation; or straightforward copying of other, similar products.
     • browsing a collection of designs will inspire designers to consider alternative perspectives and hence alternative solutions
   • • How to choose among alternatives
     • making design decisions
     • Broadly speaking, though, the decisions fall into two categories:
       • externally visible and measurable features
       • characteristics internal to the system
     • informed by letting users and stakeholders interact with them and by discussing their experiences, preferences, and suggestions for improvement.
       • Documentation is one traditional way to communicate a design
       • Prototyping is often used to overcome potential client misunderstandings
       • two different variations and collect data from actual use that is then used to inform the choice. This is called A/B testing,
     • quality differentiation
       • Subjective measure
     • Usability engineering involves specifying quantifiable measures of product performance, documenting them in a usability specification, and assessing the product against them.
   • • How to integrate interaction design activities with other lifecycle models
     • to integrate these practices focus on agile software development.
       • • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools • Working software over comprehensive documentation • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation • Responding to change over following a plan

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