Interaction Design

• Interaction design focuses on designing interactive products to assist people in everyday communication.
• Interaction design aims to create positive user experiences for interactive services, devices, and products.

Who is involved in Interaction Design?

• Interaction design requires an understanding of users, emotions, perception, communication, technology, business, manufacturing, and marketing.
• Multidisciplinary teams include engineers, designers, psychologists, sociologists, artists, and product managers.
  • Benefits: Generates more ideas and original designs.
  • Disadvantages: Can be difficult to communicate as different languages and values can cause breakdown and confusion.
  • Complex and costly.

Designing Interactive Products

• Key considerations include:

  • Identifying the users.
  • Defining activities or tasks.
  • Where the product should be used.

• Interaction design focuses on what people are good and bad at.

• Interaction design aims for the ability to help people with how they do things.

• The interaction between users should be effective, useful, and usable.

• User opinions should be garnered and included in the designs.

• User-centered design techniques should be used during the design process.

Relationship Between IxD, HCI, and Other Fields

• Design practices contributing to Interaction Design:
  • Graphic and product design.
  • Artist and industrial design.
  • Film industry

UX, UI, IA, IxD

• Designers often work across different specialisms.
• UX relates to designing the overall user experience.
• IA focuses on organizing information logically by considering the information architecture.
• UI relates to considering granular design of the user interface.
• IxD helps with determining the interaction between a system and its user.

Service Design

• Service design, business design, software design, and user-centered design are types of design. Examples include but are not limited to experience strategy, user research, and product, and web design

The User Experience

• "The way people feel about it and their pleasure and satisfaction when using it, looking at it, holding it, and opening or closing it".

• Nielsen and Norman in 2014 relate that it includes all end-user interaction for company services and products.

• User experience cannot be designed, but designed for.

• Hornbæk and Hertzum in 2017 say the way users perceive a product relates to the emotional reaction people have .

• Wikipedia describes how "User experience (UX) is a person's emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system, or service. It includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human–computer interaction and product ownership."

Hassenzahl's model of User Experience

• Pragmatic goals: relates to how simple, practical and obvious interacting is for users. Hedonic: relates to how evocative and stimulating the interaction is to users.

Core Characteristics of Interaction Design

• It is essential to involve users throughout the development process of any interaction design.
• Specific usability and user experience goals also need to be identified, clearly documented, and agreed at the beginning of any project.

Understanding Users

• Understand how users design their interactive products to fit the user, and also what people want, need and desire out of the product.
• Identifying incorrect assumption users may have allows for a different user experience.

Accessibility and Inclusiveness

• Accessibility: the extent to which any interactive product is available for as many people as possible
• Inclusiveness: making products for all and available regardless of disability, education, age or income

Understanding Disability

• Disabilities can be classified as: -Sensory impairments: such as vision or hearing loss. -Physical impairments: the loss of bodily function as a result of accidents like strokes. -Cognitive Impairments: which may include loss of cognitive functions as you get older.

HCI and Designing for Disabilities

• Those with permanent disabilities may use assistive technologies routinely in their own lives.
• Assistive Technologies can be improved through the use of current technologies such as wearables and VR.

Accessible Designs

• David Benyon said in his book that 5 reasons a product may be inaccessible are: -Physical: too hard to use. -Conceptual: has hard-to-understand instructions. -Economic: too expensive. -Cultural: doesn't understand interaction metaphors. -Social: on joining a group the user does not understand conventions.

Accessibility Through Universal Design

• Applying the following principles will increase accessibility in product design: -Equitable use: making products for all, including design for the deaf. -Flexible use: products should accommodate right and left handed people. -Simple and Intuitive: simply complex information, by using information hierarchy. -Perceptible Information: optimize readability of vital information, i.e by using pictures and text.

Usability Goals

• Usability is more than ease of use, and requires designs to be efficient, easy to learn and be error tolerant.
• Some trade-offs have to be made for economic viability.
• Usability should be the priority unless there is a conflict, usability should be a priority.

7 Factors that Affects UX

• The seven factors of user experience by Peter Morville include: -Useful -Usable -Findable -Credible -Desirable -Accessible -Valuable

Designing for users on the Autistic Spectrum

• Dos: Use simple colours and plain english
• Donts: Use bright contrasting colours or figures of speech

Designing for users with Dyslexia

• Dos: Use images and diagrams to support the text
• Donts: Use large blocks of text or underline the word
• Use good colour contrast
• Don't separate actions

Designing for users who are low vision

• Do use colour contrasts and clear font size
• Do follow a linear layout
• Don't bury information

Cultural differences in product design

• Date formats for international services should be taken into account.

User Experience Goals

• Desirable Aspects Include: Being helpful, fun, enjoyable, and more.
• Undesirable Aspects Include: Being dissatisfying, boring, unpleasant and more

Design Principles include:

• Generalizable abstractions for different aspects of design.
• Do’s and don’ts of interaction design.
• Things to provide and not provide at the interface.
• Knowledge, experience, and common sense.
• The elevator control panel is an example of an user interface.

Visibility

• You need to insert your room card in the slot by the buttons to actually get the elevator to work.
• Elevator user interfaces are great examples of poor interfaces for visibility

Feedback

• Sends information to the user about what has been done.
• The goal is to be immediate.

Constraints

• Restricts the possible actions performed, and helps prevent user from selecting incorrect options.

Consistency

• Design interfaces to have similar operations using similar elements for similar tasks.
• Functional elements of the design should have similar ways to convey information
• Systems are usable and learnable when similar concepts are expressed this way. It enables quick transfer knowledge from old contexts and ability to focus on the task.

Affordances

• Referring to an object by its ability to allow people to figure how to use it.
• Used to discuss the design of everyday objects but popularized. Norman argued that the design of everyday objects, since virtual, are hard to define and don't really have any value.

Interaction Design Key points

• Optimizing this requires constant balancing and consideration of key user elements.
• Design principles, such as usability are key examples in improving interactive products.