Chapter 1


WHAT IS INTERACTION DESIGN?

Lecturer:
Lecturer: Azita
Nazir AzimiQasemi
Ahmad
Spring 2018
 Organization Issues

Lectures: 3 hours per week

Exercise: 2 hours per week

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Examination & grade

Final exam: 60%

Mid term: 20%
Class exercise: 20%

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 Course Content
• Understanding • Process of interaction
Interaction design design
• Cognitive aspects • Design, prototype,
• Emotional interactions construct
• Types of Interface • Interaction design in
• Data gathering practice
• Evaluation
• Data analysis

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 • How many of them are actually
How many interactive
products are in there in easy, effortless, and enjoyable to
your everyday life?? use?
• Why is there a difference?
• Smartphone
• Tablets 1. some of them have been
• Computers designed preliminary with
• Remote control the user in mind, so easy
• Coffee machine and enjoyable to use.
• ATM
• Printers • Smartphone, social
• TV networking sites
• Games console
2. Some of them have been
• … the list is endless.
engineered preliminary as
systems to perform set of
functions.

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 Good and bad design
• A central concept of interaction design is to develop
interactive products that are usable.
• Easy to learn
• Effective to use
• and providing an enjoyable user experience

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Poor Design

Source: http://www.baddesigns.com/starbucks.html
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 Good design

• Marble answering machine (Bishop, 1995)

• Based on how everyday objects behave

• Easy, intuitive and a pleasure to use

• Only requires one-step actions to perform core tasks

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 What to design

• Need to take into account:

– Who the users are
– What activities are being carried out
– Where the interaction is taking place

• Need to optimize the interactions users have with a

product:
– So that they match the users’ activities and needs

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 Understanding users’ needs
– Need to take into account what people are good and
bad at

– Consider what might help people in the way they

currently do things

– Think through what might provide quality user

experiences

– Listen to what people want and get them involved

– Use tried and tested user-centered methods

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 What is interaction design?

• “Designing interactive products to support the way people

communicate and interact in their everyday and working
lives.”
– Preece, Sharp and Rogers (2015)

• “The design of spaces for human communication and

interaction.”
– Winograd (1997)

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 Goals of interaction design

• Develop usable products

– Usability means easy to learn, effective to use
and provide an enjoyable experience

• Involve users in the design process

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 Which kind of design?

• Number of other terms used emphasizing what is being

designed, e.g.
– user interface design, software design, user-centered design,
product design, web design, user experience (UX) design
• Interaction design is the umbrella term covering all of
these aspects
– fundamental to all disciplines, fields, and approaches concerned
with researching and designing computer-based systems for
people

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HCI and interaction design

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 Working in multidisciplinary teams
• Many people from different backgrounds involved


• Different perspectives and ways of seeing and talking

about things

• Benefits
– more ideas and designs generated

• Disadvantages
– difficult to communicate and progress forward the designs being
create

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 What do professionals do in the ID
business?
• interaction designers - people involved in the design of all the
interactive aspects of a product


• usability engineers - people who focus on evaluating products, using

usability methods and principles


• web designers - people who develop and create the visual design of
websites, such as layouts


• information architects - people who come up with ideas of how to plan

and structure interactive products


• user experience designers (UX) - people who do all the above but who
may also carry out field studies to inform the design of products

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 The User Experience
• How a product behaves and is used by people in
the real world
– the way people feel about it and their pleasure and satisfaction
when using it, looking at it, holding it, and opening or closing it
– “every product that is used by someone has a user experience:
newspapers, ketchup bottles, reclining armchairs, cardigan
sweaters.” (Garrett, 2010)
– “all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its
services, and its products. (Nielsen and Norman, 2014)

• Cannot design a user experience, only design for

a user experience
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Why was the iPod user experience such a
success?

• Quality user experience

from the start

• Simple, elegant, distinct

brand, pleasurable, must
have fashion item,
catchy names, cool, etc.

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 What is involved in the process of
interaction design

• Establishing requirements

• Developing alternatives

• Prototyping

• Evaluating

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Core characteristics of interaction design

• Users should be involved through the

development of the project

• Specific usability and user experience goals

need to be identified, clearly documented and
agreed at the beginning of the project

• Iteration is needed through the core activities

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 Why go to this length?
• Help designers:

– understand how to design interactive products that fit

with what people want, need and may desire
– appreciate that one size does not fit all
e.g., teenagers are very different to grown-ups

– identify any incorrect assumptions they may have

about particular user groups
e.g., not all old people want or need big fonts

– be aware of both people’s sensitivities and their

capabilities

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 Are cultural differences important?

• 5/21/2015 versus 21/5/2015?

– Which should be used for international services and
online forms?

• Why is it that certain products, like the iPod, are

universally accepted by people from all parts of
the world whereas websites are reacted to
differently by people from different cultures?

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 Accessibility
• Degree to which a product is usable and accessible by as
many people as possible

• Focus on disability:

– Have a mental or physical impairment

– This has an adverse affect on their everyday lives
– It is long term

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 Anna, IKEA online sales agent

• Designed to be 

different for UK and US 

customers

• What are the differences 


and which is which?

• What should Anna’s 


appearance be like 

for other countries, 

like India, South Africa,

or China?

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 Usability goals
• Effective to use

• Efficient to use

• Safe to use
• Have good utility

• Easy to learn

• Easy to remember how to use

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 User experience goals
Desirable aspects
satisfying helpful fun
enjoyable motivating provocative
engaging challenging surprising
pleasurable enhancing sociability rewarding
exciting supporting creativity emotionally fulfilling
entertaining cognitively stimulating

Undesirable aspects
boring unpleasant
frustrating patronizing
making one feel guilty making one feel stupid
annoying cutesy
childish gimmicky

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 Usability and user experience goals

• Selecting terms to convey a person’s feelings, emotions,

etc., can help designers understand the multifaceted
nature of the user experience

• How do usability goals differ from user experience goals?

• Are there trade-offs between the two kinds of goals?

– e.g. can a product be both fun and safe?

• How easy is it to measure usability versus user

experience goals?

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 Design principles
• Generalizable abstractions for thinking about different
aspects of design

• The do’s and don'ts of interaction design

• What to provide and what not to provide at the

interface

• Derived from a mix of theory-based knowledge,

experience and common-sense

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 Visibility

• This is a control panel for an elevator

• How does it work?

• Push a button for the floor you want?

• Nothing happens. Push any other button?

Still nothing. What do you need to do?

www.baddesigns.com • It is not visible as to what to do!

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 Visibility
…you need to insert your room card in the slot by the
buttons to get the elevator to work!

How would you make this action more visible?

• make the card reader more obvious

• provide an auditory message, that says what to do
(which language?)
• provide a big label next to the card reader that flashes
when someone enters

www.baddesigns.com • make relevant parts visible

• make what has to be done obvious

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 Feedback
• Sending information back to the user about what has
been done
• Includes sound, highlighting, animation and
combinations of these

– e.g. when screen button clicked on provides sound or red

highlight feedback:

“ccclichhk”

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 Constraints

• Restricting the possible actions that can be

performed
• Helps prevent user from selecting incorrect
options
• Physical objects can be designed to
constrain things
– e.g. only one way you can insert a key into a lock

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Logical constraints:
A menu showing restricted availability of options as an example
logical constraints.

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Logical or ambiguous design?
• Where do you plug the
mouse?

• Where do you plug the

keyboard?

• top or bottom connector?

• Do the color coded icons

help?
www.baddesigns.com

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How to design them more logically
(i) A provides direct
adjacent mapping
between icon and
connector

(ii) B provides color coding

www.baddesigns.com
to associate the
connectors with the
labels
www.baddesigns.com

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 Consistency
• Design interfaces to have similar operations and use
similar elements for similar tasks

• For example:
– always use ctrl key plus first initial of the command for an
operation – ctrl+C, ctrl+S, ctrl+O

• Main benefit is consistent interfaces are easier to learn

and use

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 When consistency breaks down
• What happens if there is more than one command
starting with the same letter?
– e.g. save, spelling, select, style

• Have to find other initials or combinations of keys,

thereby breaking the consistency rule
– e.g. ctrl+S, ctrl+Sp, ctrl+shift+L

• Increases learning burden on user, making them more

prone to errors

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 Internal and external consistency

• Internal consistency refers to designing

operations to behave the same within an
application
– Difficult to achieve with complex interfaces

• External consistency refers to designing

operations, interfaces, etc., to be the same
across applications and devices
– Very rarely the case, based on different designer’s
preference

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 Keypad numbers layout

• A case of external inconsistency

(a) phones, remote controls (b) calculators, computer keypads

1 2 3 7 8 9
4 5 6 4 5 6
7 8 9 1 2 3
0 0

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 Affordances: to give a clue
• Refers to an attribute of an object that allows people to
know how to use it
– e.g. a mouse button invites pushing, a door handle affords pulling

• Norman (1988) used the term to discuss the design of

everyday objects

• Since has been much popularised in interaction design to

discuss how to design interface objects
– e.g. scrollbars to afford moving up and down, icons to afford
clicking on

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 What does ‘affordance’ have to offer
interaction design?

• Interfaces are virtual and do not have affordances like physical

objects

• Norman argues it does not make sense to talk about interfaces in

terms of ‘real’ affordances

• Instead interfaces are better conceptualized as ‘perceived’

affordances
– Learned conventions of arbitrary mappings between action and
effect at the interface
– Some mappings are better than others

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 Activity
– Virtual affordances

How do the following screen objects afford?

What if you were a novice user?

Would you know what to do with them?

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 Key points
• Interaction design is concerned with designing interactive
products to support the way people communicate and
interact in their everyday and working lives

• It is concerned with how to create quality user

experiences

• It requires taking into account a number of

interdependent factors, including context of use, type of
activities, cultural differences, and user groups

• It is multidisciplinary, involving many inputs from wide-

reaching disciplines and fields

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Any Questions?

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 Assignment
✓ This assignment is intended for you to put into practice what you have read
about in this chapter. Specifically, the objective is to enable you to define
usability and user experience goals and to transform these and other design
principles into specific questions to help evaluate an interactive product.
✓ Find an everyday handheld device, e.g. remote control, digital camera,
smartphone, and examine how it has been designed, paying particular
attention to how the user is meant to interact with it.
1. From your first impressions, write down what first comes to mind as to what is
good and bad about the way the device works.
2. Give a description of the user experience resulting from interacting with it.
3. Based on your reading of this chapter and any other material you have come
across, compile a set of usability and user experience goals that you think will be
most relevant in evaluating the device. Decide which are the most important ones
and explain why.
4. Translate each of your sets of usability and user experience goals into two or
three specific questions. Then use them to assess how well your device fares

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Deadline: Saturday
24/03/2018

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