User-Centered Interaction Design

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Design is a practical and creative activity where the intent is to develop a product that helps users achieve their goals.

To develop a product we need to know:

• What is required of it?
• Who the users are?
• Will the users know what they need?

Interaction Design

Interaction design is a goal-directed problem solving activity informed by intended use, target domain, materials, cost and feasibility.

It is a creative activity and also a decision-making activity to balance trade-offs.

There are four basic activities in interaction design:

1. Identifying needs and establishing requirements
2. Developing alternative designs
3. Building interactive versions of the designs
4. Evaluating designs

Three characteristics permeate these four activities:

1. User focus – focus on users early in the design and evaluation of the artefact
2. Specific usability criteria – identify, document and agree specific usability and user experience goals
3. Iteration – iteration is inevitable, designers never get it right first time

Some practical issues must be considered:

• Who are the users?
• What are their ‘needs’?
• Where do alternatives come from?
• How do you choose among alternatives?

Who are the users and stakeholders?

Users and stakeholders of a product are not as obvious as one might think:

• Those who interact directly with the product
• Those who manage direct users
• Those who receive output from the product
• Those who make the purchasing decision
• Those who use the competitor’s products

What are their ‘needs’?

Establishing the users’ needs requires representative users from the real target user group.

Users rarely know what is possible and can’t easily tell you what they need to help them achieve their goals, instead, look at existing tasks performed:

• Their context
• What information do they require?
• Who collaborates to achieve the task?
• Why is the task achieved the way it is?

Where do alternatives come from?

Humans like what they know works, hence, “if it’s not broken, why fix it?”. However, considering alternatives is a critical step in the design process.

Alternatives can be generated by ‘flair and creativity’ or by seeking inspiration by looking at similar, or very different, products.

How do you choose among alternatives?

Evaluation is key. Going backwards in the design process is expensive so it’s crucial to prototype and evaluate.

User-Centered Development

User-centered development is the process of using knowledge of users and their tasks to inform the design, consequently it requires user involvement in the development process.

We need to use techniques that engage users actively and productively in the design.

There are strong benefits for involving users in the design and development process. Firstly there are issues of expectation management, it allows a company to communicate clearly, while avoiding hype. Secondly, there are issues of ownership, where involving users will help them to become more active stakeholders, and hence, more forgiving.

There can be different degrees of user involvement. Users can become members of the design team, either full time, part time, short term or long term. Or a newsletter or other information dissemination device can be used but communication must be both ways.

There are five principles to clarify focus on users and tasks:

1. Users’ tasks and goals are the driving force behind the development
2. Users’ behaviour and context of use are studied and the system is designed to support them
3. Users’ characteristics are captured and designed for
4. Users are consulted throughout the development from earliest phases to the latest and their input is seriously taken into account
5. All design decisions are taken within the context of the users, their work and their environment

There are four main approaches for involving users into the design process:

• Ethnography
• Coherence
• Contextual Design
• Participatory Design

Ethnography

Ethnography is a method that comes from anthropology and means ‘writing the culture’. So in essence it is used to understand the culture. Design and ethnography are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Design is concerned with abstraction, ethnography is about detail. The difficulty with ethnography is to collect the detail so that it can be used to form the design.

The following method can be used to adopt ethnography:

Instead of taking data from ethnographers, why not train developers to gather data themselves? This has the advantage of given designers/developers first-hand experience of the situation – shadowing is a technique that can be employed.

Coherence

Coherence combines the experiences of using ethnography to inform design with developments in the requirements engineering.

Coherence is specifically designed to integrate social analysis with object-orientated analysis such as producing use-cases. Coherence claims to facilitate the identification of a products most important use cases using ‘concerns’.

The following are coherence concerns:

1. Paperwork and computer work – these are the plans and procedures used as a mechanism for developing and sharing an awareness of work
2. Skills and the use of local knowledge – ‘workarounds’ that are developed in organisations and are at the heart of how the real work gets done
3. Spatial and temporal organisation – consider the physical layout of the workplace and areas where time is important
4. Organisational memory – formal documents, individuals may keep their own records, or there may be local gurus

Contextual Design

Going to the workplace (the context) and seeing what happens. The partnership principle states that the developer and the user should collaborate in understanding the work through cooperation.

There are seven parts to contextual design:

1. Contextual inquiry
2. Work modeling
3. Consolidation
4. Work redesign
5. User environment design
6. Mock-up and test with customers
7. Putting it into practice

Participatory Design

This is where users are actively involved in the development. They are considered equal partners in the design team and they design the product with cooperation with the designers.

Mockups are one way to make effective user of users’ experience and knowledge.

Aspects to user involvement include:

• Who will represent the user community? Interaction may need to be assisted by a facilitator
• Shared representations
• Co-design using simple tools such as paper or video scenarios
• Designers and users communicate about proposed designs
• Cooperative evaluation such as assessment of prototypes

Related posts:

1. What Is Interaction Design?
2. User-Interface and Design Evaluation
3. Software Accessibility
4. The Mechanics of Interaction
5. How Interfaces Affect Users

Tagged as: hci