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Erik Poole

Textbook Journal5/27/08

The textbook, Interaction Design, provides not only an overview of interaction design, but also delves into the process of completing a thorough analysis. Each of the chapters covers a specific topic related to interaction design, starting with a brief overview of the field and ending with an explanation of the final step in the interaction design process, evaluation. Throughout the text, the primary theme of focusing on the user as a project goes from conception to implementation is constantly highlighted upon. The text provides an excellent overview of how to design everything from interfaces to small mobile applications. The many processes covered are also done so in a very methodical manner and are often accompanied by case studies or examples, which provide real overviews of the process.

Chapter 1: What is Interaction Design

Designing usable interactive products requires considering who is going to be using them, how they will be used and where they are going to be used. It is important to understand the activities people are doing while they interact with the products. The number of activities is diverse and what can be done with them is just as immense. The interfaces for these devices are increasingly becoming digital, which requires interaction design.

Interaction design is about creating user experiences that enhance the way people work communicate and interact. The term is an “umbrella term” and covers a wide range of aspects including software design, interaction deign and experience design for example. Interaction design encompasses relationships among academic disciplines, design practices and interdisciplinary fields associated with interaction design.

As interaction design is made up of many fields, it is only fitting individuals from different backgrounds are involved in the field. A number of companies, such as Nielsen Norman Group and IDEO, have emerged as having experts in the field of interaction design.

A central concept of interaction design is user experience. This is regarded as how a product behaves and is used by people in the world. The process of interaction design involves four basic act ivies:

  1. Determine the needs and establish the requirements for the user experience
  2. Develop alternative designs that will also meet the identified requirements
  3. Build "interactive" designs that can be presented to the user and evaluated
  4. Analyze what is built during the process with a focus on the user experience it provides

To be effective, interaction design must take into account the user experience. This includes recognizing and taking into account the usability goals and the user experience goals. To assist in working towards the user experience, designers should follow design principles:

  • Feedback
  • Visibility
  • Constraints
  • Consistency
  • Affordance

Chapter 2: Understand and conceptualizing interaction
Understanding the problem space greatly helps one move on the conceptualize phase. This usually involved developing a conceptual model, a method of describing what the system is going to be and how it will be used by the users. Conceptual models provide a framework of general concepts and how things are interrelated. Johnson and Hendersong (2002) recommend conceptual models should be comprised of the following:

  • The major metaphors that are used to convey how to understand what a product is. The metaphors are meant to elicit the essence of the product in a manner that connects the product to familiar aspects of other products.
  • The concepts that users are exposed to through the product
  • The relationships between the concepts
  • The mappings between the concepts and the user experience

When developing a conceptual model, there are a few things a designer should be careful about. Make sure the metaphors and mappings you use are of well designed products. Using poorly designed products will result in negative results. Ensure the design model is based on well known concepts. It can be thought of as “outside the box,” but it should still be recognizable to the user. It is a good idea to also think of the way an end user interacts with the system when developing a conceptual model. There are four fundamental types of interaction that should be considered:

  1. Instructing – how users input instructions to a system
  2. Conversing – how users dialog with the system
  3. Manipulating – whether users can alter or change the objects
  4. Exploring – where users move through a virtual environment or a physical space

Chapter 3: Understanding Users
For a product to be successful, the user must be taken into account. Part of this is determining the user’s cognitive state. Cognition is what occurs in our heads as we live through our everyday activates. There are different types of cognition processes that make up cognition. The first type of cognition is attention. This is a process of figuring out what to concentrate on at any given time. How well goals are defined and how well information is presented influences how well one can focus attention. Another type of cognition is perception. Perception refers to how we obtain information from the environment via different senses. Perception is very complex as it differs for each user and each sense. As a manner of helping perception, when designing applications, the use of multiple forms of media should be utilized to present information in different manners.
The third type of cognitive state is memory, which involves recalling various things that allow us to act in a certain manner. The context in which something occurs greatly affects how we remember something. In addition, humans are much better at recognizing things than remembering. Thus, it is important to incorporate recognition rather than recall in designs. Despite this, memory load and overload have become common themes in our lives especially as memory is used as a security device.
Learning as a cognitive state can be successful via applications as GUI’s provide a way of learning by doing. This is opposed to the method of reading instructions, which people seem to not prefer. As other devices are used such as linking and representations, learning becomes more successful.
To help designers better prepare for the cognitive sate of users, a number of frameworks have been developed to predict user behavior. Mental models are used to reason about a system and predict how users will interact with a fully built application. One thing we must avoid as designers is the use of incorrect mental models. Making the use and function visible to the user should help prevent this.
A theory of action specifies what a user does at an interface in terms of different stages of activity. This theory proposes users interact with a system in a set series of sequential steps. This model tries to predict what the user will do at each step and how they will proceed to the next. A problem with this is users don’t typically think in sequential steps.
Information processing is a metaphor for how people process information – basically it is thought that information enters and exits via a set of processing stages. These stages are: encoding, comparison, response selection and response execution. While information processing occurs within our heads, most stimulation occurs from the outside.
External cognition takes this type of cognition into account. External cognition is concerned with explaining the processes involved when individuals interact with outside forces. Finally, distributed cognition takes a look at cognition from a number of different angles such as individuals, artifacts and external forces. This type of cognitive situation is common with complex situations. The example given in the book is an airplane cockpit, which has factor of other humans, external factors and the interaction of things.

Chapter 4: Designing for collaboration and communication

An important aspect of most people’s lives is being social. Whether it’s communicating with others or acquiring news from various sources, social has become more important. Communication is done through many avenues. The most common form of communication comes from conversation, which follows traditional rules of back and forth banter and relies on communication cues (e.g. feedback). There has been a lot of research in developing systems that allow people to converse as well as share dialog and work with one another while spread out over great distances.

Collectively, technologies that allow people to collaborate are known as computer-mediated communication (CMC). Some traditional technologies such as email and videoconferencing have become common tools that allow people to communicate over distances. Other tools such as multi-user playing environments (MUDs) and multimedia applications that combine text, video and audio are being researched as ways to communicate. Similar advances in technology have been designed to allow groups to communicate. Systems have been designed and implemented that allow users to share media via a number of tools (cameras, laptops, etc.).

Collaboration tools aren’t limited to traditional communication techniques. Systems have been designed that allow others to read facial expressions and body movements. In addition, scheduling and coordination tools are used to increase productivity in the workplace. These come in the form of commonly thought of tools such as calendars, but also extend to technologies that allow people to dialog between one another via their workstation. Communication doesn’t need to be structured as newer technologies have been designed to allow users to share their conscious stream of knowledge. Users now have the ability to post content without the context of a conversation – it comes as users see fit.

Chapter 5: Affective Aspects

Interaction design should elicit positive responses from users. This is known as affective computing. Basically, the goal of the application should be to make the user happy or, at the least satisfied. While the system doesn’t necessarily need to show an emotion, it should elicit an emotion from the user. Some of these emotions can be conveyed via:

  • Emoticons
  • Animations
  • Spoken messages (audio)
  • Various sounds that mean something (e.g., Windows start up sound)

There are a number of aspects of an application that can influence people’s emotions. The style of the interface or the layout of the applications GUI has a great influence of how people perceive the application. If the layout is confusing or nontraditional, the user may become frustrated and confused. Inappropriate use of audio, animation or graphics can confuse users and detract from the message. On the other hand, a user will usually be quite satisfied when dealing with an easy to use application. This is important, as aesthetics have proven to have a positive effect on people. In fact, when designs look good, users are more tolerant of the negative aspects of the tool. For example, when dealing with a well-designed and aesthetically pleasing application, a user may wait a little longer for something to load or an action to occur.

Aesthetics aren’t the only factor when trying to please users. Many times negative feelings occur when a user must interact with an application that doesn’t do what it is intended to do. Initially, companies tried to combat that have deploying artifacts and helpers (e.g., Microsoft Paperclip), but these were seen as obtrusive by the users and never really caught on. These devices were typically seen as “childish” and were not used as extensively as the organizations originally thought. Other reasons a user may feel negatively towards an application include:

  • When a system crashes unexpectedly. This is an obvious frustration and one that anyone who has ever used an application has probably experienced.
  • When a user’s expectations aren’t met. If the application isn’t doing what the user thinks it should, this most likely results in frustration and eventually lack of use.
  • When the system doesn’t provide sufficient information to let the user know what to do. As systems become more complex and contain more steps, feedback is vital for use.
  • When the error messages that pop up are vague. These often make the user feel dumb, or at the least frustrated.
  • When the appearance of the interface are gimmicky or noisy. These interfaces can create confusion by not properly indicating the proper function.
  • When the systems are complicated. Again, systems are increasingly becoming complex. It is imperative systems are simple to use so the use cannot be questioned.

The characteristics above usually end up driving end uses away and may make it so the application isn’t used at all anymore. One method of preventing negative feelings in users is by applying human like qualities to applications. This practice is known as anthropomorphism. While there are detractors, some companies have become quite successful in building toys that extract human like responses. For example, Nintendo has come up with a line of virtual pets that must be treated as real pets and taken care of by their “owner.”

Chapter 6 Interfaces and Interaction

Interfaces have evolved dramatically over the past few years. This has caused a shift in how interface design and interaction have been studied. When studying interfaces, one first must consider the type of interface. During the 1980’s, command line interfaces were dominant. These rely on users entering commands via text. These led to the development of the WIMP and GUI interface. WIMP, which stands for windows, icons, menus and pointers were boxy in design and often constrained users by the number of tools available to them.

The basic building blocks of WIMP interfaces are found in today’s GUI interfaces. Modern interfaces still make use of menus, and icons, for example. Windows are now used to overcome the physical constraints of a computer display. Users can now display many windows on one screen, allowing users to display more information than ever before and increase their ability to multitask. This has lead to a key research area as more people are studying how to best allow for windows management. The key is to determine the best way to move between windows and switch one’s attention to find what they want and need.

To this regard, menu layout has become an important issue as we try to determine the best way for people to find information. For example, some operating systems have begun using cascading menus as a way to display large amounts of information. Still other menus exist that rely on contextual clues such as icons or short text descriptions. Finally, the use of “flat” menus is used to display small amounts of information.

When using icons to display information, designers should rely on isomorphic icons as they provide direct mapping between what is being represented and what the icon displays. In other words, users must understand the context of the icon. If needed, adding text is a viable solution to the help describe the icon and it’s function. Companies such as Microsoft and Apple have begun posting information on their website as a means of informing users on proper ways of creating icons.

It is assumed a combination of media can be used to present information in a way that allows users to understand the content better. Not only can text be provided as a way of describing something, but also audio or video can be used to show demonstrations or reinforce the text. In situations that use multimedia, it has been found that users sometimes skip the text portion of the application and focus on the media aspect, as it is generally more “fun.” As we continue to use applications that combine media, designers must take into account how the different aspects will be accessed. Research must also be conducted on what combinations and presentation methods work best.

Web interfaces have become, perhaps, the most important interface type. Early interfaces consisted of just plain text with some hyperlinks, but new technologies have increased the complexity of the interfaces while adding to the difficulty of designers, who must take a number of factors into account. For example, when working with the web, download times are always important, as is navigation, ease of use, etc. Within the industry, there are some discrepancies as to how to best design a web interface. Some experts suggest “vanilla” websites work best as they make it easiest to navigate and locate text. Others argue designers should make it aesthetically pleasing as a way to draw user interest.

With the advent of new technologies, designers are faced with the task of creating new interfaces for all kinds of devices and applications. While the interfaces can be dramatically different, the goal of the designer should be the same: to provide the user an easy to use device. The following are some examples of what was covered: Virtual reality environments can be used to provide new experiences to the user and provide opportunities for testing and participating in scenarios that would normally be too costly or dangerous. Speech interfaces should be concerned with how to design systems that can recognize speech and convert it to another text, all while making the transformation seems natural. Mobile device use is on the rise and so is the need to design interfaces for the applications that are utilized by mobile users. This requires, among other things, trying to design an application that works in a very small environment.