What are the steps of the Interaction Design process? Explain them and their aims.
- User Research
- Discover users, their characteristics, abilities, limitations.
- Find out about what they do: their goals, the activities they engage in to achieve those goals, the problems they experience, what they need.
- Find out about where they do it: the context (physical, social, organisational) - Conceptual Design
- Identify design alternatives
- Evaluate design alternatives
- Select design(s) to refine
- Repeat
Aims:
- Design high-level concepts
- Envision user’s future activities
- Explore alternatives - lots of alternatives
- Evaluate alternatives
- Think about new technology and how you can use it
- Detailed Design
- Refine and detail design(s)
- Evaluate design(s)
- Select design(s) to retain
- Repeat
Aims:
- Choose between alternatives
- Design details of presentation and interaction
- Create interactive prototypes
- Evaluate prototypes
- Evaluation
Aims:
- Formative evaluation of designs to identify problems and improve
- Summative evaluation of designs to measure usability with metrics
List the different types of activities for each of the Interaction Design stages (4 points each)
User Research
- Interviews, questionnaires, focus groups, diary studies
- Observations, ethnography
- Evaluations of existing systems
- Litrature
- Personas, empathy maps, user journeys, task models requirements
Conceptual Design
- Sketching
- Brainstorming
- Low-fi prototyping
- User journeys, storyboards
- ‘Borrowing’ inspirations
Detailed Design
- Wire-framing
- High-fidelity prototyping
- Applying guidelines
- Creating design rationale
Evaluation
- User testing
- Expert evaluations e.g. heuristic evaluation
- Interviews and UX questionnaires
- Design critique
What is Design Thinking?
Empathise Define Ideate Prototype Test
When and why do we collect user data?
Early in design -> To understand the design problem, understand users, their activities, problems, opportunities etc.
During evaluation of prototypes and systems -> To reveal usability problems, to investigate the UX and to measure usability.
What is Qualitative and Quantitative Data, and what is a key problem with data?
Qualitative: All non-numeric data
- Exploring things that you don’t know about or don’t want to measure
Quantitative: All numeric data or data based on numbers
- Measuring things you know you want to measure
Problem: Data contains bias
What 5 key practices should you do when collecting data.
- Set goals
- Identifying participants & how many are needed.
- Think about relationship with participants
- Triangulation (the use of a variety of methods to collect data on the same topic, which. involves different types of samples as well as methods of data collection)
- Pilot studies
What are Direct Observations good for? (3 points)
- Great for finding out what people really do rather than what they say they do
- Great for getting detailed information and when tasks are difficult to verbalise
- Focuses on user action and changes of state in the observable world
What are the 2 different types of Observer Involvement?
- Outsider
- Insider
What is Ethnography?
- Writing about people
- When a researcher participates in the use context of a situation for months if not years.
What things should you consider when planning to observe?
- Have a clear purpose
- Choose a framework (e.g. Robson 2011)
Space, Actors, Activities, Objects, Acts, Events, Time, Goals, Feelings - Decide how to record data
- Think about how to gain access and ethics
- Capture the details of what you are observing
- Highlight and separate personal option from what happens
- Consider working as a team
Give 5 strengths and 5 drawbacks of observations
Strengths:
- Gets info about activities that have observable behaviour or stages
- Provides detailed, in-depth information
- Good for gathering info about activities that involve many steps which might be left out verbally.
- Good for getting info about activities that are hard to verbalise (skilled behaviour)
- Good for info about unknown and unexpected activities
- Useful for confirm info gathered using other techniques.
Weaknesses:
- Time-consuming
- Not so useful when the users’ activities are cognitive rather than observable
- Not so useful for events that happen only occasionally
- Often not sufficient on its own
- Involves a greater degree of assuming on the part of the researcher - potential bias
What 3 pieces of information should you focus on getting when interviewing or creating questionnaires?
- Facts - what people know
- Behaviour - what people do
- Beliefs/attitudes - what they think or feel
What are the 3 different types of questions and when are they most useful to use?
Open: Early design stage
Closed: Evaluation stage
Scale - variant of closed… 1 - 5 Do you agree or disagree?
What are 3 strengths and 3 weaknesses for interviews and questionnaires?
Strengths:
- Faster to carry out than observations
- Can cover infrequent events e.g. something that happens just once a year
- And can cover things you can’t observe.
Weaknesses:
- Information is idealised version of what should rather than what does happen, often generalised and lacking detail
- Responses may lack accuracy or honesty
- Danger of researcher bias towards subset of knowledge s/he possesses: you only find out about what you ask about
Summarise “The First Rule of Usability”.
- To design the best UX, pay attention to what users do, not what they say.
- Past years, the greatest barrier was cool design. Billions of dollars were wasted making flashy looking websites.
Now
- Public websites now aim to make it easy for customers to do business.
- Intranets are similar refocused on improving employee productivity with many companies attempting to create order, impose design standards, and enhance navigation on previously chaotic intranets.
- The battle now is to get companies to do usability right.
Basic rules of usability:
- Watch what people actually do
- Do not believe what people say they do
- Definitely don’t believe what people predict they may do in the future.
Self reported data is typically not very accurate
- People bend the truth to be closer to what they think you want to hear or what is socially acceptable
- In telling you what they do, people are really telling you what they remember doing. Human memory is not great.
- In reporting what they remember, people rationalise their behaviour.
To get reliable feedback conduct formal testing and ask users to fill out a survey at the end.
Summarise “Attractive Things Work Better”
Affect is a concept used in psychology to describe the experience of feeling or emotion , the word “affect” as a noun being seldom used in other fields.
- Beauty should be equal to usability in design. Beauty and pleasure also matter.
- Users emotion state affects the way they problem solve
- Good aesthetic experience makes a positive affect, it makes you feel better and therefore has an impact on how you use it, solve problems. If you are in a positive affect state it makes you more creative in responding in a situation, better at problem solving and overlook small design flaws.
- If you want people to be creative, you should put them in a good mood.
- Under conditions of great stress you need to get things done. Users won’t be thinking about aesthetics. You need to make the task as easy and usable as possible.
- If you are in a negative affect, e.g. stressed, you focus on getting the thing done and you don’t think very clearly or cleverly about solving the problem.
- Think of situation - if you’re designing something that will be used in a stressful situation, has to be purely easy to use. Usability is most important thing here.
- Different things matter in different situations e.g. tea making in the morning as quickly as possible, rather than the lovely teapots.
- Process has to be usable and efficient in the morning.
- How attractive things influence how people feel, and that in turn influences how people use systems.
- If you’re in a stressful situation, the product has to be really obvious how to operate it.
- Users emotional state and how that influences behaviour.
