Final Text Book Journal – INFO 608
Final Text Book Journal
Rajeev Iyer
10142873
Introduction
Education is defined as encompassing teaching and learning specific skills, and also something less tangible but more profound: the imparting of knowledge, good judgment and wisdom. Education has as one of its fundamental goals the imparting of culture from generation to generation. This is a noble goal that has been in place for a while. Over time, the collective knowledge of a subject has been distilled into a handful of books that are marketed as textbooks, required reading for the masses yearning to learn. These textbooks have purported to store all necessary knowledge and to seek, strive and learn from one source, but there are a few gems, diamonds in the rough as it were, that state they do not possess all the knowledge. These textbooks are willing to work with the reader, and state trends, ideas and practices without judgment. Furthermore, these textbooks provide an almost interactive experience keeping the reader engaged, and thinking, whiles remaining affordable. Interaction Design : Beyond Human Computer Interaction by Sharp, Rogers and Preece is one of those textbooks.
As a course assigned book, interaction design emphasized current practices, as well as stated possibilities. To demonstrate the usefulness of user interaction, a number of activities were prescribed, and to a certain extent the students in the course performed. The performance helped highlight issues that could not be ascertained without personal experience. As a part time software engineer, Human Computer interaction (HCI) would always play a part in the development of any product that I was associated with. However HCI did not always require extensive psychological profiles, and feel good analyses of the software. The first step stated was what would the user want? This simple philosophy drives the life cycle of a software development project. All products developed are for the users, and taking into consideration some practicalities, the developers are not the end users, they are merely enablers. By granting power to the people, and taking into consideration the suggestions and needs of users early in the process of development will save time and resources down the line.Changing requirements is a time consuming process, and prevents work in evolving the current product.
Beyond User Interaction, the textbook provided alternative means of realizing requirements for a project, and designing user interfaces. By creating and walking through storyboards, the Graphical User Interface will be driven by user needs, and not by developer shortcuts. This technique may add some time to the initial development life cycle, but will reward the team through reducing the changes that are often necessary in the product that did not take users directly into account. Furthermore, by emphasizing that an interface alone is not enough of a consideration when designing, and that the team must look to control the interaction process, creating the new term, Interaction design, drawing together multi-disciplinary, competent, and user centric personnel for a pleasant interaction experience.
Week 1
Chapter 1: What is Interaction Design?
Human Computer interaction is growing at an increasingly exponential pace. All products sold today that have to be used by a consumer will have a user experience. Companies can design for a user experience but cannot design the user experience. Interaction design has grown to be a superset of human computer interaction as the development of interaction systems have evolved to take into account interaction designers and systems.
The focus of interaction design is very much concerned with the practice and the development of the user experience. It is not concerned with the mechanics of design. They are concerned with people and the interactions between them and systems. Computer scientists on the other hand deal with issues realizing a project including practicalities like cost, standardizations and aspects of design.
A concept central to interaction design is the user experience. The process of interaction design requires 1) Identifying needs and establishing requirements for the user experience. 2) Developing alternative designs to meet those requirements. 3) Building interactive versions of those designs so that they can be assessed. 4) Evaluating what is being developed and the user experience it offers. Usability of a design is broken down into a set of goals including 1) effectiveness, 2) efficiency, 3) safety , 4) utility, 5) learnability and finally 6) memorability. Design principles to keep in mind during the design process are Visibility, feedback, constraints, consistency, and affordance. Interaction design is multi-disciplinary, and optimizing the interaction between user and system requires taking into account a number of interdependent factors including context of use, types of activities, cultural differences and user groups.
Chapter 2: Understanding and Conceptualizing Interaction
The process of articulating a problem space is generally a team effort. Team members will have differing perspectives on the problem space. The first step in designing to fix the problem space is to understand the problem space. This requires that the team research and hypothesize reasoning behind the problems and future costs of those issues with the problem. The second step is for the design team to conceptualize the design space , which primarily consists of describing the functionality of the system and what the system will be to its users. The conceptual model consists of a) the major analogies and metaphors. B) the concepts, c) the relationships between concepts and d) the mapping of all these ideas. It is possible that designers may fall into the trap of overly literal translations of devices in an attempt to maintain the metaphor strategy. There are many interaction types that are used to describe user behavior including a) instructing, b) conversing, c) manipulating and d) exploring. Other sources of information that is used to guide research is based on theories, models and frameworks. A theory is a well substantiated explanation of some aspect of a phenomenon. A model is a simplification of some aspect of human computer interaction intended to make it easier for a designer to predict and evaluate designs. A framework is a set of interrelated concepts and/or a specific set of questions that is intended to inform a particular domain area. Decisions about conceptual design must be made before commencing any physical design.
Week 2:
Chapters 3: Understanding Users
Cognition can be defined as different kinds of processes including attention , perception, and recognition , memory, learning, reading, speaking and listening, and problem solving, planning reasoning, decision making. The development of task managers and multiple applications running simultaneously on computers has resulted in a decreasing span of attention. “Sliced attention” has resulted in the development of kinetic users often taking care of multiple tasks at the same time. Thus to draw users in faster it is necessary to reduce the learning curve and increase simplicity by reducing clutter. Users prefer to learn by doing. One form of interactivity for learning found to be successful is dynalinking, where abstract representations are linked together with more concrete illustrations of what they stand for. Another implication of learning is to use design interfaces that encourage exploration, and design interfaces that constrain and guide users to select appropriate actions when initially learning.
For understanding, speech based menus must be kept short, accentuate intonation of nuances in artificial speech and finally provide the option to increase font size of text without messing the font. These speech based menus can often form incomprehensive user flows in overly complicated designs. Service providers with massive product differentiation are often guilty of violating this principle. Provide additional user information as requested by the user hidden away from simplified tasks, and use simple and memorable functions in the interface to support rapid decision making. Norman’s theory of action can be broken down into 7 parts. 1) Establish a goal, 2) form an intention, 3) specify an action sequence 4) execute an action 5) perceive the system state. 6) interpret the state 7) evaluate the system state with respect to the goals and intentions. The main benefit of conceptual frameworks and cognitive theories are that they explain user interaction and predict user performance.
Chapter 4: Designing for Collaboration and Communication
Three core forms of social mechanisms are used to form the basis of collaborative models of communications. The first is the use of conversational mechanisms to facilitate the flow of talk and help overcome conversational break downs. The second is the use of coordination mechanisms to allow people to work and interact. The use of awareness mechanisms to find out what is happening; and consequently to let others know what is happening. Ambiguity breaks down communication, and with the rise of asynchronous communication techniques, ambiguity results in loss of time money and resources. Synchronous communication includes talking with voice and talking with text, both modes of which wish to include non-verbal cues as well. Project management systems that rely exclusively on computer mediated collaboration mechanisms have not proven to be as effective as expected, especially when coordination is used for large groups of people or events. In response companies have tried turning the “technology inside out”, where tech is the background, and analog is the foreground. Social and community services have brought about changes in the way people interact with each other.
Week 3:
Chapters 5: Affective Aspects
The term affective refers to the generation of an emotional response. Ways of conveying status of a system is through the use of Dynamic icons, animations, spoken messages, and various sounds and events. One benefit of using expressive embellishment is to provide feedback to the user that is informative and fun. Poorly designed interfaces can make users feel insulted, look stupid or feel threatened. This can easily occur when an application does not work correctly, crashes, works opposite to expected results, does not meet user expectations, or does not provide sufficient information for the next step. The worst issue is making a user redo some or all of his work due to an error occurring in the steps and procedures. Threatening error messages can cause users to feel frustrated, or in computer phobic users causes them to stop exploring or working. Errors should tell the user how to get past the error and not warn the user. Reduce waiting on websites to reduce frustration. Remove overly cluttered animations and pictures and increase simplicity to find information faster. Anthropomorphism can lead to people having a false sense of security, but far worse is that fact that most people hate computers that have anthropomorphic capabilities. Once users find that the system is not really human like, they quickly grow disillusioned and abandon the system. Visceral level is the low level part of the brain that is pre-wired to automatically respond to events happening in the physical world. The behavioral level has the brain process the control for everyday behavior. At the reflective level, the brain processes contemplate. Visceral level responds quickly making snap judgments.
The pleasure models relies on the interaction of the user with a product/environment and the pleasure derived from it where, 1) physio pleasure, 2) socio pleasure, 3) psycho pleasure, and ideo-pleasure are the standards of design selection. Technologies can be designed to persuade people to change their behavior or attitude.
Chapter 6: Interfaces and Interactions
Within interaction design, a paradigm refers to a particular approach that has been adopted by the community of researchers and designers for carrying out their work. In terms of shared assumptions, concepts, values and practices. The acronym WIMP was used to characterize the core features of an interface for a single user, standing for Windows, Icons, Menus and pointer, later being superseded by Graphical User Interface GUI. Ubiquitous computing was a new revolution of the industry, where it would form the center of a person’s attention when needed, and fade to the periphery when not needed. A widget is a standardized display representation of a control that can be manipulated by the user. Interface menus are necessarily different based on location, culture and circumstances. The greater flexibility offered by current GUI Interfaces has enabled developers to create icon sets that are distinguishable, identifiable, and memorable. A number of gesture based systems have been developed for controlling home appliances, moving images around a wall and various forms of entertainment. Many interfaces now exist that are beyond the traditional GUI. Web interfaces are growing and becoming more like multimedia based interfaces.
Chapter 7: Data Gathering
Data gathering sessions need to be planned and executed carefully. Four issues associated with data gathering are goal setting, the relationship between the data collector, and the provider, triangulation, and pilot studies. Goal setting must be in place prior to involving users and developers in data gathering. Each planned data gathering session should be tested by running a pilot program. The relationship between the collector and the provider must be decided and designated by level of participation and questions. Triangulation involves a combination of data gathering techniques. Data may be gathered by the most convenient method available at hand that completely captures the extent of data and its various types. The three styles of interviews are structured, semi-structured, and unstructured interviews. Questions should be open or closed and not hybridized, free form questions should be allowed for open, and a specific set of inputs available for closed. In direct observation, the observer may adopt different levels of participation ranging from insider to outsider, where insider is a participant observer, and outsider is a passive observer. The range of data gathered and the effectiveness of it is determined by the focus of the study, as well as the clear goals set, and the data gathering techniques. Relevancy is also a strong component of data sifting.
Week 4
Chapters 8: Data Analysis, Interpretation, and Presentation
All forms of data gathering discussed result in qualitative and quantitative data gathered. The steps in analyzing data include interviews, questionnaires, observation. The data from these methods must first be analyzed, requiring the clean up of the raw data, and filtering into information. As the analyzer becomes more familiar with data, recurring themes and patterns will begin to emerge. Qualitative data analysis may be framed by theories. Three such theories are grounded theory, activity theory, and distributed cognition. A distributed cognition analysis involves producing a detailed description of the domain area at varying levels of granularity. The findings of data analysis can be done in a number of ways, rigorous notation, using stories and /or summarizing findings.
Chapter 9: The Process of Interaction Design
The best way to ensure that development continues to take user’s activities into account is to involve real users throughout development. In this way developers can gain a better understanding of user’s goals, leading to a more appropriate, more usable product. A user centered approach must have focus on the users through, 1) user’s tasks and goals are the driving force behind the development. 2) User’s behavior and context of use are studied and the system is designed to support them, user’s characteristics are captured and designed for. 4) Users are consulted throughout development from the earliest phases to the latest and their input is taken into account, 5) All design decisions are taken within the context of the users, their work and their environment.
Practical issues to consider are 1) who are the users? 2) what do we mean by needs? 3) how do you generate alternate designs 4) How do you choose among alternatives?
Looking at other’s design provides useful inspiration and encourages designers to consider alternative design solutions, which is key to effective design. Usability criteria, technical feasibility, and user’s feedback on prototypes can all be used to choose between alternatives. Prototyping is a useful technique for facilitating user feedback on designs at all stages. The interaction design life cycle model is complimentary to lifecycle models from other fields.
Week 5:
Chapters 10: Identifying Needs and Establishing Requirements
Requirements’ gathering is a vital part of the development of a new project. As the first major step in realizing the goals of a project, any errors at this stage will cause a massve trickle down effect in design and development. There are different kinds of requirements; functional, data, environmental, user characteristics, usability goals and user experience goals. Every product will have requirements under each of these headings, which means that massive effort must be expended in detailing correct requirements. In addition, the user will play a massive role in providing the basis for the requirements documentation. To obtain this information, it is necessary to use data gathering techniques like questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, and other similar tactics. The amount of time spent on these activities may seem to be excessive but unless the process is tested the benefits will be hard to gage. This technique needs to be tested personally before implementation in a large scale development, although the observations bear out in terms of the design projects for VMT users.