Basics of Interaction Design

Good & Poor Designs

• A voice-mail system is poorly designed because it's confusing, inefficient, and lacks visual feedback on the number of messages
• A poorly designed remote control provides no intuitive way to understand which button does what

What to Design

• When designing interactive products, it's crucial to consider the user, their context, and the activities they'll be performing.
• Designers need to understand the kind of users, the activity being supported, and the context of use

What Is Interaction Design

• Interaction design focuses on creating user experiences that enhance communication and interaction in daily lives
• It aims to optimize interactions with systems, environments, or products, making them effective, pleasurable, and usable

Interaction Design

• Interactive design aims to transform human-human transactions into interface-based ones
• It seeks to extend users' activities in effective, pleasurable, useful, and usable ways

Who is Involved?

• Interaction design involves various fields including academic disciplines, design practices, and interdisciplinary fields
• Combining diverse backgrounds in a design team leads to more ideas, methods, and creative designs but can be costly and challenging due to communication issues arising from different perspectives

Benefits of Diverse Teams

• Diverse teams generate more ideas, methods, and creative designs but can be costly and challenging due to communication issues arising from different perspectives

Activity 1

• The composition of a design team depends on the product being built.
• To develop a public kiosk providing information about science museum exhibits requires a different skill set compared to developing an interactive educational website accompanying a TV series

Is Interaction Design Beyond HCI?

• The main difference between interaction design (ID) and human-computer interaction (HCI) is scope
• HCI historically focused on computer systems usability while ID encompassed designing user experiences for wider technologies and products
• Over time, HCI expanded its scope, leading to significant overlap with ID

Accessibility and Inclusiveness

• Accessibility refers to making interactive products accessible to the maximum number of people, focusing on those with disabilities
• Inclusive design aims to accommodate the widest possible range of people, regardless of abilities, education, age, or income
• Accessibility can be achieved through inclusive design and assistive technology
• Impairments leading to disability are classified by type, such as sensory, physical, and cognitive impairments

User Experience Goals

• User experience (UX) goals aim to make products enjoyable, effective, efficient, engaging, and error-free
• UX design requires understanding user needs, behaviors, and motivations to create products that meet their needs
• Designers must consider user needs and preferences to ensure positive user experiences
• UX design aims to make products easy to learn, use, remember, and satisfying to use
• Usability is essential for effective interaction and involves aspects like learnability, efficiency, memorability, and error prevention

Homework

• Read Chapter 1, “Interaction design - beyond human-computer interaction”
• Visit http://www.baddesigns.com/examples.html and pick an example to demonstrate in the next lecture
• Research Emotional Design (ED)

This quiz explores the principles of good and poor design in interaction design, emphasizing the importance of user context and experience. It covers the key concepts that enhance communication and usability of products and systems. Test your knowledge on how to create effective and enjoyable user interactions.