Lecture: 5

Interaction Design and HCI in the Software Process

 Course outline

• What is interaction design?

• Constraints of interaction design?
• Golden rules of interaction design?
• Interactive system life cycle?
• Aspects of interactive design?
 WHAT IS 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 designing interactive products to support the way people communicate and
interact in their everyday and working lives.
• It requires taking into account a number of interdependent factors, including
context of use, type of activities, cultural differences, and user groups
• The designer must focuses on
• Who the users are
• What activities are being carried out
• Where the interaction is taking place
• Interaction design includes
• Software design
• Web design
• Smart watches
• GPS
• Social medias
• Reservation systems
• Games etc.
• Design is achieving goals within constraints.
• The more common skill needed in design is to accept the conflict
and choose the most appropriate trade-off.
 • Goals
• What is the purpose of the design we
are expecting to produce?
• Who is it for? Why do they want it? • Trade off
• What is expected from the design? • Of course, we cannot always
• Why design is required? achieve all our goals within the
constraints.
• Constraints
• Balance between goal and
• What materials must we use?
• What standards must we adopt?
constraints.
• How much can it cost? • Depends on the choice the users.
• How much time do we have to
develop it?
• Are there health and safety issues?
• Design is achieving goals within constraints.
• the more common skill needed in design is to accept the conflict
and choose the most appropriate trade-off.
 Cont…

• The designs we produce may be different, but often the raw

materials are the same. This leads us to the golden rule of
design:
• Understand your materials
• understand computers
• limitations, capacities, tools, platforms
• understand people
• psychological, social aspects
• human error
• and their interaction …
 What is involved in the process of interaction design

• Identifying needs and establishing requirements for the user

experience
• Developing alternative designs to meet these
• Building interactive prototypes that can be communicated and
assessed
• Evaluating what is being built throughout the process and the user
experience it offers
 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
THE PROCESS OF DESIGN
 Steps

• Requirements – what is wanted?

• The first stage is establishing what exactly is
needed.
• For example,
• How do people currently watch movies?
• What sort of personal appliances do they currently use?
• There are a number of techniques used for this in
HCI:
• Interviewing people, looking at the documents and
objects that they work with, observing them directly.
• Analysis
• The results of observation and interview need to be ordered in some
way to bring out key issues and communicate with later stages of
design.
• Design well
• This is all about design, but there is a central stage when you move
from what you want, to how to do it.
• There are numerous rules, guidelines and design principles that can
be used to help with this.
• We need to record our design choices in some way and there are
various notations and methods to do this, including those used to
record the existing situation
• Iteration and prototyping:
• Humans are complex and we cannot expect to get designs right
first time.
• We therefore need to evaluate a design to see how well it is
working and where there can be improvements.
• There are various techniques for evaluation.
• Some forms of evaluation can be done using the design on paper,
but it is hard to get real feedback without trying it out.
• So iteration and prototyping is a repeating cycle of designing,
prototyping, testing, and refining multiple “versions,” or
iterations, of a product.
• Implementation and deployment
• Finally, when we are happy with our design, we need to create
it and deploy it.
• This will involve writing code, perhaps making hardware,
writing documentation and manuals – everything that goes
into a real system that can be given to others.
 How to integrate interaction design
in other models

• Software engineering is the discipline for understanding the

software design process, or life cycle

• Interaction design occurs at many stages of the life cycle, not

as a single isolated activity

14
Software process models:
The waterfall model
Requirements
specification

Architectural
design

Detailed
design

Coding and
unit testing

Integration
and testing

Operation and
maintenance

15
• The waterfall model: takes the fundamental process activities of specification,
development, validation, and evolution and
• Represents them as separate process phases such as requirements specification,
software design, implementation, testing, and so on
• It is a sequential design process, in which progress is seen as flowing steadily
downwards (like a waterfall) through the phases
• Each phase must be completed before the next phase can begin and there is no
overlapping in the phases
• It is applicable for well-defined requirements
The life cycle for interactive systems

Requirements
specification

cannot assume a linear

Architectural
design sequence of activities
as in the waterfall model
Detailed
design

Coding and
unit testing

Integration
and testing
lots of feedback!
Operation and
maintenance
17
 Where and How Interaction Design plays?

Requirements
specification
Requirements: focus
on all stakeholders
Architectural
Interaction and their need
and Interface
design
Design

Design & Detailed

design
Implementation:
focus on interface and Interaction
Coding and
interaction unit testing and Interface
Implementation
mechanisms
Testing: focus on Integration
and testing
features directly
perceived by end- Operation and
users maintenance

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 Another aspects of interactive
design

1. USER FOCUS
• The start of any interaction design exercise must be the intended
user or users. This is often stated as:
• know your users
• The designer should consider the human factors
• The cognitive process
• How the user perceive your system?
• how do you get to know your users?
• Cognition includes basic mental processes such as sensation, attention, and
perception. Cognition also includes complex mental operations such as memory,
learning, language use, problem solving, decision making, reasoning, and intelligence.
• Who are they?
• The first thing to find out is who your users are.
• Are they young or old, experienced computer users or beginners?
• This question becomes harder to answer if you are designing generic
software, such as a word processor, as there are many different users
with different purposes and characteristics.
• Probably not like you!
• When designing a system, it is easy to design it as if you were the main
user: you assume your own interests and abilities.
• So often you hear a designer say ‘but it’s understandable what to do’.
• “develop as per your user specification not as per your need”
• Talk to them
• It is hard to get yourself inside someone else’s head, so the best thing
is usually to ask them.
• This can take many forms: structured interviews about their job or
life, open-ended discussions, or bringing the potential users fully
into the design process.
• Although what people tell you is of the most importance, it is not the
whole story.
• The last of these is called participatory design.
• Watch them
• Watch what people do? Their difficulties,
• Your observation will tell you everything.
• Because of this it is important to watch what people do as well as
hear what they say.
• This may involve sitting and taking notes of how they spend a day,
watching particular activities, using a video camera or tape recorder.
2. Scenarios
• Scenarios are stories for design
• A scenario is a description of a person’s interaction with a
system.
• Scenarios may be related to ‘use cases’, which describe
interactions at a technical level.
• Unlike use cases, however, scenarios can be understood by
people who do not have any technical background.
• Scenarios are a resource that can be used and reused throughout
the design process:
• helping us see what is wanted, suggesting how users will deal with
the potential design, checking that proposed implementations will
work, and generating test cases for final evaluation.
3. Navigation
• It is the process of navigating a system , an application or a
website using a dialog box, widgets, hypertexts ….which is
one of the most important aspects of a website.
• Widgets: an element of a graphical user interface (GUI) that
displays information or provides a specific way for a user to
interact with the operating system or an application.
• Screens or windows: you need to find things on the screen,
understand the logical grouping of buttons.
• Navigation within the application : You need to be able to
understand what will happen when a button is pressed, to
understand where you are in the interaction.
• Generally
• The platform for human-computer interaction is offered by UI.
• There can be different forms of UI.
• On the basis of combination of the hardware and the
software, UI can take any of the forms such as audio based,
text-based, it can be graphical form.
• The following features of the user interface enables to
increase the popularity of the system.
• Attractive
• Simple to use
• Responsive in short time
• Clear to understand
• Consistent on all interfacing screens