What is interaction design? Eileen Kraemer CSCI 4800/6800 University of Georgia

Problem: Many products that people interact with have not been designed with the user in mind. Result: Users fail to accomplish task or achieve less-than-optimal result Task requires more time and resources than necessary

Bad design Good examples of bad design at:

Goals of interaction design To design products that are easy, effective, and enjoyable to use.

Good interaction design … Produces products that are: Easy to learn Effective to use Provide an enjoyable user experience

Questions to ask when designing interactive products: Who is going to be using them? Where are they going to be used? What kinds of activities will users perform when interacting with the product?

Preparing yourself to produce “good” interaction designs: study literature on “principles of good design” study literature on ranges of user abilities – perceptual, cognitive, etc. learn techniques for measuring such abilities learn techniques for needs analysis, requirements analysis, task analysis, implementation, evaluation learn techniques for “user-centered design” learn techniques for creating/managing multi- disciplinary teams

Overlaps w/ other disciplines Software engineering focus is on production of the software artifact Interaction design focus is on the user experience Analogy: civil engineering vs. architecture

Other disciplines, cont’d. Academic Disciplines Design Practices Interdisciplinary Fields

Academic Disciplines related to Interaction Design Ergonomics Psychology/Cognitive Science Informatics The study of the application of computer and statistical techniques to the management of information Engineering Computer Science/Software Engineering Social Sciences Sociology, Anthropology

Brief History of Interaction Design Early on: by engineers, for engineers switches, dials Later (70s, early 80s) VDUs (monitors), personal workstations non-engineer users high-level programming languages psychologists explore human capabilities re: computer-based tasks WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointers) GUI research

Brief History of Interaction Design Mid-80s new technologies: speech recognition, multimedia, info viz, VR focus on education, training interactive learning environments, educational software, training simulators educational technologists, developmental psychologists, training experts become involved

Brief History of Interaction Design 1990s: Technology advances: networking, mobile computing, IR sensing “ubiquitous computing” single user focus -> multi-user focus

Brief History of Interaction Design 2000s: Technology advances: RF-tags, large interactive screens, information appliances For now, focus is back on engineers, who need to create middleware that allows various HW devices to easily communicate with one another Also on “seamless” integration of computing into everyday tasks

The Interaction Design Process Identify needs / establish requirements users must be involved establish specific usability and user experience goals Develop alternative designs that meet those requirements Build interactive versions (prototypes) for evaluation Evaluate the prototypes based on the established usability and user experience goals... repeat

Goals of interaction design Usability goals: effectiveness does the system do what its supposed to do? efficiency related to productivity of experienced user safety are users protected from “dangerous” or undesirable situations? utility does the system provide the right kind of functionality to permit users to do what they need/want to do? learnability How easy is it/how long does it take a) to get started w/ basic tasks, b) to learn wider range of needed operations? memorability Once learned, how easy is it to remember how to use system? Usability criteria: % of users able to successfully perform task(on first try, after training, after elapsed time) time to complete a task, time to learn a task, number of errors in completing a task.

Goals of interaction design User experience goals deal less with “productivity” type tasks; focus is more on entertainment, education, home use, etc. satisfying enjoyable fun entertaining helpful motivating aesthetically pleasing supportive of creativity rewarding emotionally fulfilling subjective measures of user satisfaction, relative subject duration See: Ben Bederson’s talk on “Interfaces for Staying in the Flow” at : See paper that introduces notion of relative subjective durationrelative subjective duration

Design principles - Sources Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things and The Design of Everyday Things Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things, and some chapters from this new book Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things Prologue: The Three Teapots Attractive Things Work Better Epilogue: We Are All Designers Tog’s (Bruce Tognazzini’s) First Principles of Interaction Design

Design Principles from The Design of Everyday Things visibility (and placement) Functions that are out of sight are difficult to find, know how to use Positioning of controls can indicate or obscure their function Feedback Info back to user on success of tasks, state of system Constraints Restricting the kind of user interaction currently available Mapping The relationship between contorl and their effects Consistency Similar tasks controlled by similar operations and elements Affordance An attribute of an object that allows people to know how to use it.

Heuristics and Usability Principles (Nielsen 2001) 1. Visibility of system status 2. Match between system and the real world 3. user control and freedom 4. consistency and standards 5. help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors 6. error prevention 7. recognition vs. recall 8. flexibility and efficiency of use 9. aesthetic and minimalist design 10. help and documentation

Next …. Design principles and heuristics, specifically for working with Java and the Swing components.