What Is Interaction Design?

Products need to be usable, meaning:

• easy to learn
• effective to use
• provide an enjoyable experience for users

Designers need to understand what kind of activities people are doing when interacting with the products.

The key question to ask is how do you optimise the users’ interaction with the system so that it matches the activities that are being supported.

Interaction Principles

To support [human-computer] interaction the following must be considered:

• what people are good and bad at
• what could help people with the way they currently do things
• what might provide quality user experiences
• what people want and involve them in the design
• using tried and tested user-based techniques

Interaction Design Process

The process of interaction design involves four activities:

• identifying the users’ needs and establishing requirements
• developing alternative designs that meet those requirements
• building interactive versions of the design so that they can be communicated and assessed
• evaluating what is being built throughout the process

The three characteristics of the interaction design process are:

• user involvement
• specific usability and user experience goals agreed and documented at the beginning of the project
• iteration through the four activities

Usability Goals

Usability is:

“The capability of the software to be understood, learned, used and attractive to the user when used under specific conditions”.

ISO 9126

The goals of usability are:

• effectiveness – effective of use
• efficiency – efficient to use
• safety – safe to use
• utility – have good utility
• learnability – easy to learn
• memorability – easy to remember how to use

Norman’s Design of Everyday Things

Norman considers a number of design principles:

• Visibility – ability to see may improve ease of use
• Feedback – sending back information about what action has been done and what has been accomplished
• Constraints – determine ways of restricting the kind of user interaction that can take place at a given minute
• Mapping – the relationship between controls and their effects in the world
• Affordance – an attribute of an object that allows people to know how to use it

Nielson’s Usability Principles

Nielson identified the following usability principles:

• Visibility of system status
• Match between system and real world
• User control and freedom
• Consistency and standards
• Help users recognise, diagnose and recover from errors
• Error prevention
• Recognition rather than recall
• Flexibility and efficiency of use
• Aesthetic and minimalist design
• Help and documentation

Related posts:

1. User-Centered Interaction Design
2. User-Interface and Design Evaluation
3. An Analysis of Amazon against Neilson’s Usability Principles
4. How Interfaces Affect Users
5. Usability and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Analysis of Amazon

Tagged as: hci