What is Interactive Design?

• A central concern of interaction design is to develop

interactive products that are usable.
• By this is generally meant :
– easy to learn,
– effective to use,
– and provide an enjoyable user experience.
• A good place to start thinking about how to design usable
interactive products is to compare examples of well and
poorly designed ones.
• Through identifying the specific weaknesses and strengths of
different interactive systems, we can begin to understand
what it means for something to be usable or not.
 What to Design?
• Designing usable interactive products thus requires considering
who is going to be using them and where they are going to be
used.
• Another key concern is understanding the kind of activities
people are doing when interacting with the products.
• The appropriateness of different kinds of interfaces and
arrangements of input and output devices depends on what
kinds of activities need to be supported.
– For example, if the activity to be supported is to let people communicate
with each other at a distance, then a system that allows easy input of
messages (spoken or written) that can be readily accessed by the intended
recipient is most appropriate. In addition, an interface that allows the users
to interact with the messages (e.g., edit, annotate, store) would be very
useful.
 What to Design? (Contd.)
• The range of activities that can be supported is diverse.
– Just think for a minute what you can currently do using computer-
based systems: send messages, gather information, write essays,
control power plants, program, draw, plan, calculate, play games-to
name but a few.
• Now think about the number of interfaces and interactive
devices that are available. They, too, are equally diverse:
– multimedia applications, virtual-reality environments, speech-based
systems, personal digital assistants and large displays-to name but
a few.
• There are also many ways of designing the way users can
interact with a system
– e.g., via the use of menus, commands, forms, icons, etc.
 What to Design? (Contd.)
• What this all amounts to is a multitude of choices and
decisions that confront designers when developing interactive
products.
• A key question for interaction design is: how do you optimize
the users' interactions with a system, environment or
product, so that they match the users' activities that are
being supported and extended?
• One could use intuition and hope for the best.
 What to Design? (Contd.)
• Alternatively, one can be more principled in deciding which
choices to make by basing them on an understanding of the
users. This involves:
– taking into account what people are good and bad at
– considering what might help people with the way they currently do
things
– thinking through what might provide quality user experiences
– listening to what people want
– getting them involved in the design using "tried and tested" user-
based techniques during the design process.
 The process of interaction design
• Essentially, the process of interaction design involves four
basic activities:
– Identifying needs and establishing requirements.
– Developing alternative designs that meet those requirements.
– Building interactive versions of the designs so that they can be
communicated and assessed.
– Evaluating what is being built throughout the process.
• These activities are intended to inform one another and to
be repeated.
– For example, measuring the usability of what has been built in terms
of whether it is easy to use provides feedback that certain changes
must be made or that certain requirements have not yet been met.
 The process of interaction design (Contd.)
• Evaluating what has been built is very much at the heart of
interaction design.
• Its focus is on ensuring that the product is usable.
• It is usually addressed through a user-centered approach to
design, which, as the name suggests, seeks to involve users
throughout the design process.
• There are many different ways of achieving this:
– for example, through observing users, talking to them, interviewing
them, testing them using performance tasks, modeling their
performance, asking them to fill in questionnaires, and even asking
them to become co-designers.
 The process of interaction design (Contd.)
• A main reason for having a better understanding of users is
that different users have different needs and interactive
products need to be designed accordingly.
• In addition to the four basic activities of design, there are
three key characteristics of the interaction design process:
– Users should be involved through the development of the project.
– Specific usability and user experience goals should be:
• identified,
• clearly documented,
• and agreed upon at the beginning of the project.
– Iteration through the four activities is inevitable.
 The goals of interaction design
• Part of the process of understanding users' needs, with respect
to designing an interactive system to support them, is to be
clear about your primary objective.
• Is it to design a very efficient system that will allow users to
be highly productive in their work, or is it to design a system
that will be challenging and motivating so that it supports
effective learning, or is it something else?
• We call these top-level concerns usability goals and user
experience goals.
– Usability goals are concerned with meeting specific usability criteria
(e.g., efficiency).
– User experience goals are largely concerned with explicating the
quality of the user experience (e.g., to be aesthetically pleasing).
The goals of interaction design – Usability Goals
• Usability is generally regarded as ensuring that interactive products
are easy to learn, effective to use, and enjoyable from the user's
perspective.
• It involves optimizing the interactions people have with interactive
products to enable them to carry out their activities at work, school,
and in their everyday life.
• More specifically, usability is broken down into the following goals:
– effective to use (effectiveness): is a very general goal and refers to how good
a system is at doing what it is supposed to do.
– efficient to use (efficiency): the way a system supports users in carrying out
their tasks.
– safe to use (safety) : Safety involves protecting the user from dangerous
conditions and undesirable situations.
– have good utility (usefulness) : the extent to which the system provides the
right kind of functionality so that users can do what they need or want to do.
– easy to learn (learnability) : how easy a system is to learn to use.
– easy to remember how to use (memorability) : how easy a system is to
remember how to use, once learned.
 The goals of interaction design – User Experience Goals

• satisfying
• enjoyable
• fun
• entertaining
• helpful
• motivating
• aesthetically pleasing
• supportive of creativity
• rewarding
• emotionally fulfilling
The goals of interaction design (Contd.)