Understanding and Conceptualizing Interaction

Understanding and Conceptualizing Interaction

1. Articulating the nature of the problem space.

   • Having a good understanding of this greatly helps to conceptualize the design space.
     • Orientation
       • How the conceptual model will be understood by the targeted users.
     • Open-mindedness
     • Common ground
       • Establish a set of common terms that all can understand and agree upon.
         • Reducing the chance of misunderstandings and confusion arising later on.
   • What is currently the user experience/product and how this is going to be improved or changed.
     • 1. Choose which technology to employ 2. Decide how to design the physical aspects

2. conceptual model

   • Can be represented as
     • Textual description
     • Diagrammatic form
   • Is a high-level description of how a system is organized and operates
   • Working strategy, a framework of general concepts and their interrelations.
     • Metaphors and analogies
       • How to understand what a product is for and how to use it for an activity
     • The concepts that people are exposed to through the product
       • The relationships between those concepts
       • Including the task–domain objects they create and manipulate.
     • The mappings between the concepts and the user experience the product is designed to support or invoke
       • How the components are organized determines the user experience

3. Interface Metaphors

   • They provide a structure that is similar in some way to aspects of a familiar entity,but also have their own behaviors and properties
     • That enable people to readily understand the underlying conceptual model and know what to do at an interface

4. Interaction Types

   • These are the ways a person interacts with a product or application
     • Instructing
       • Where users issue instructions to a system
     • Conversing
       • Where users have a dialog with a system
     • Exploring
       • Where users move through a virtual environment or a physical space
     • Manipulating
       • Where users interact with objects in a virtual or physical space
         • Physical actions with immediate feedback

5. Other sources

   • Vary in terms of their scale and specificity to a particular problem space
     • Paradigm
       • General approach that has been adopted by a community
         • They all has agreed upon
     • Vision
       • Future scenario that frames research and development in interaction design
     • Theory
       • Well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of a phenomenon
     • Model
       • Simplification of some aspect of human–computer interaction
         • Easier for designers to predict and evaluate alternative designs.
     • Framework
       • Set of specific questions that are intended to inform a particular domain area
         • The designer's model
         • The system image
         • The user's model