Interaction Design

Interaction Design

Interaction Design is concerned with designing interactive products to support the way people communicate and interact in their everyday and working lives. It is multidisciplinary, involving many inputs from wide-ranging disciplines and fields. Good interaction design involves getting the balance between aesthetic appeal and the right amount and kind of information per page. Great interaction design creates the potential for compelling experiences. Interaction design shapes the experiences of people as they interact with products in order to achieve their goals and objectives. Interaction designers define product behavior, mediating relationships between people and people, people and products, people and environments, and people and services across a variety of contexts. %BR%
Interaction design attempts to improve the usability and experience of the object or system, by first researching and understanding certain users' needs and then designing to meet and exceed these needs.
And HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) is one of Interaction Design scope.

History

Interaction design was first proposed by Bill Moggridge in the late 1980s. The field was originally called "SoftFace" and later renamed "Interaction Design". In 1989, Gillian Crampton-Smith established an interaction design MA at the Royal College of Art in London (originally entitled "computer-related design" and now known as "design interactions"). In 2001, she helped found the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, a small institute in Northern Italy dedicated solely to interaction design. Today, interaction design is taught in many schools worldwide.

Usability & User Experience Goals

Interaction design creates a focus on (some of) the users%BR%
User experience meant how a product behaves and is used by people in the real world.
A central concern of interaction design is to develop interactive products that are:

• effective to use (effectiveness) - Effectiveness is a very general goal and refers to how good a product is at doing what it is supposed to do
  
• efficient to use (efficiency) - Efficiency refers to the way a product supports users in carrying out their tasks.
  
• safe to Use (safety) - Safety involves protecting the user from dangerous conditions and undesirable situations.
  
• having Good Utility (utility) - Utility refers to the extent to which the product provides the right kind of functionality so that users can do what they need or want to do.
  
• easy to learn (learnability) - Learnability refers to how easy a system is to learn to use.
  
• easy to remember (memorability) - Memorability refers to how easy a product is to remember how to use, once learned.
  

Considering what to design

The appropriateness of different kinds of interfaces and arrangements of input and output devices depends on;

• who is going to be using them.
  
• how they are going to be used.
  
• where they are going to be used.
  

General Steps in Interaction Design

There is a general process which is to create a solution (not the solution) to a known problem.
A key element in this process is the idea of iteration, where the aim is to build quick prototypes and test them with the users to make sure the proposed solution is satisfactory.

Design Research

Using design research techniques (observations, interviews, and activities) designers investigate users and their environment in order to learn more about them and thus be better able to design for them.

Concept Generation

Drawing on a combination of user research, technological possibilities, and business opportunities, designers create concepts for new software, products, services, or systems. This process may involve multiple rounds of brainstorming, discussion, and refinement.

Creation of Scenarios/Personas/Profiles

From the patterns of behavior observed in the research, designers create scenarios (or user stories) or storyboards, which imagine a future state of the product or service. Often the designer will first create personas or user profiles from which the scenarios are built.

Wireframing and Flow Diagrams

The features and functionality of a product or service are often outlined in a document known as a wireframe ("schematics" is an alternate term). Wireframes are a page-by-page or screen-by-screen detail of the system, which include notes ("annotations") as to how the system will operate. Flow Diagrams outline the logic and steps of the system or an individual feature.

Prototyping and Usability Testing

Interaction designers use a variety of prototyping techniques to test aspects of design ideas. These can be roughly divided into three classes: those that test the role of an artifact, those that test its look and feel and those that test its implementation. Sometimes, these are called experience prototypes to emphasize their interactive nature. Prototype can be physical or digital, high- or low-fidelity.

Implementation

Interaction designers need to be involved during the development of the product or service to ensure that what was designed is implemented correctly. Often, changes need to be made during the building process, and interaction designers should be involved with any of the on-the-fly modifications to the design.

System Testing

Once the system is built, often another round of testing, for both usability and errors ("bug catching") is performed. Ideally, the designer will be involved here as well, to make any modifications to the system that are required.

Interaction Design Patterns

An interaction design pattern is a general repeatable solution to a commonly-occurring usability problem in interface design or interaction design. An ID pattern usually consists of the following elements:

• Problem: Problems are related to the usage of the system and are relevant to the user or any other stakeholder that is interested in usability.
  
• Use when: a situation (in terms of the tasks, the users and the context of use) giving rise to a usability problem. This section extends the plain problem-solutions dichotomy by describing situations in which the problems occur.
  
• Principle: a pattern is usually based on one or more ergonomic principles such as user guidance, or consistency, or error management.
  
• Solution: a proven solution to the problem. A solution describes only the core of the problem, and the designer has the freedom to implement it in many ways. Other patterns may be needed to solve sub problems.
  
• Why: How and why the pattern actually works, including an analysis of how it may affect certain attributes of usability. The rationale (why) should provide a reasonable argument for the specified impact on usability when the pattern is applied. The why should describe which usability aspects should have been improved or which other aspects might suffer.
  
• Examples: Each example shows how the pattern has been successfully applied in a real life system. This is often accompanied by a screenshot and a short description.
  
• Implementation: Some patterns provide implementation details.
  

The Process of Interaction Design

1. Identifying needs and establishing requirements for the user experience.
   
2. Developing alternative designs that meet those requirements.
   
3. Building interactive version of the design so that they can be communicated and assessed.
   
4. Evaluating what is being built throughout the process a d the user experience it offers.
   

Interaction Design Principles

Certain basic principles of cognitive psychology provide grounding for interaction design. These include concepts such as mental models, mapping, metaphors, and affordances. Many of these were laid out in the influential book The Design of Everyday Things.

• Visibility - The more visible functions are, the more likely users will be able to know what to do next.
  
• Feedback - Products should be designed to provide adequate feedback to the users to ensure they know what to do next in their tasks.
  
• Constraints - The design concept of constraining refers to determining ways of restricting the kinds of user interaction that can take place at a given moment.
  
• Consistency - This refers to designing interfaces to have similar operations and use similar elements for achieving similar tasks.
  
• Accordance - This refers to an attribute of an object that allows people to know how to use it.
  

Interaction Design Domains

Interaction designers work in many areas, including software interfaces, physical products, environments, services, and systems which may combine many of these. Each area requires its own skills and approaches, but there are aspects of interaction design common to all.

Understand Conceptualizing Interaction

have a clear understanding of what, why and how you are going to design something before writing any code.

Problem Space

The design of physical aspects are best done AFTER we understand the nature of the problem space
To understand the problem space, clarify usability and user experience goals and make explicit your implicit assumptions and claims.

Conceptualizing Interaction

Conceptual Model

A conceptual model is a high-level description of how a system is organized and operates.
It describes the proposed system in terms of a set of integrated idea and concepts about what it should do, behave and look like, that will be understandable by the users in the manner intended. The most important thing to design is the user's conceptual model.


A conceptual model specifies and describes:

• Metaphors & Analogies - They are employed in the major design.
  
• Concepts - The system exposes them to users, including the task-domain data-objects users create.
  
• Relationships - between these concepts.
  
• Mappings - between the concepts and the task-domain.
  

Interface Metaphors

Metaphors are commonly used to explain something that is unfamiliar or hard to grasp by way of comparison with something that is familiar and easy to grasp. An interface metaphor is considered to be a central component of a conceptual model. It provides a structure that is similar tin some way to aspects of a familiar entity but that also has its own behaviors and properties.

Interaction Types

• Instructing - describes how users carry out their tasks by telling the system what to do. e.g. typing in commands, selecting options from menus.
  
• Conversing - is based on the idea of a person having a conversation with a system.
  
• Manipulating - involves manipulating objects and capitalizes on users' knowledge of how they do so in the physical world.
  
• Exploring - involves users moving through virtual or physical environments.
  

Understanding Users

To understanding users, focus on what humans are good and bad at, how this knowledge can be used to inform design of technologies that,
extend human capabilities and compensate for their weaknesses .

Cognition

Cognition is what goes on in our heads when we carry out our everyday activities. It involves cognitive processes, like thinking, remembering, learning, daydreaming, decision-making, seeing, reading, writing, and talking. %BR%
Cognition has been described in SIX KINDS OF PROCESSES:

• Attention - selecting things to concentrate on
  
• Perception / Recognition - how information is acquired from the environment via sense organs and translated into experiences (vision is the most dominant)
  
• Memory - recalling various knowledge. We filter what knowledge to process / memorize. (most researched area)
  
• Learning - how to do something (like learning to use a program)
  
• Reading / Speaking / Writing - using language
  
• Problem Solving / Planning / Reasoning / Decision Making - involves reflective cognition
  

Approaches to Cognition

These are the approaches to conceptualizing how the mind works has been to use metaphors and analogies.

mental models

When people are using a system, they develop knowledge of how to use the system and to lesser extent how the system works.
The mental model is used to help people carry out tasks. It can also give suggestions on what to do in unpredictable situations.

theory of action

Establish a goal, Form an intention, Specify an action sequence, Execute an acion, Perceive the system state, Interpret the state, Evaluate the system state with respect to the goal and intentions.

information processing

It's thinks of the mind as an information processor.

external cognition

People interact with or create information through using a variety of external representations.
Some of the main goals of this are:

• Externalizing to reduce memory load
  
• Computational offloading - occurs when we use a tool or device in conjunction with an external representation to help us carry out a computation.
  
• Annotating and cognitive tracing
  

distributed cognition

It involves describing a 'cognitive system,' which entails interactions among people, the artifacts they use, and the environment they are working in.

My Original Doc :
https://wiki.dev.hostway/bin/view/Main/InteractionDesigin

Referenced Original Source
<< Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction>>