The Process of Interaction Design

The Process of Interaction Design

• Interaction Design involves understanding the problem space. One must emphasize user involvement and basic activities, using a lifecycle model.
• Practical issues include identifying users, their needs, creating alternative designs, choosing among them, and fitting design activities into lifecycle design

What is Involved in Interaction Design?

• Interaction Design is a process which focuses on discovering user needs, designing solutions, prototyping, and evaluation.
• This process must focus on users and their goals. It involves making trade-offs to balance conflicting needs.
• Generating and selecting among alternatives is key.
• The design process includes:
  • Understanding who the users are, their needs, and the context.
  • Envisioning and developing multiple solutions via ideation to diverge.
  • Choosing the best ideas and storyboarding during decision-making.
  • Prototyping quickly to show to users, focusing on usability and not aesthetics.
  • Validating by showing prototypes to users outside the organization and learning what doesn't work.

IxD Design Approaches

• Design approaches include: User-centered design, activity-centered design, systems design, and genius design.
• The UI & UX Design process includes:
  • Understanding users in their environment, analyzing requirements, and defining user personas and use cases.
  • Researching competitors and trends to collect ideas and material.
  • Generating ideas, sketching, brainstorming with stakeholders, and retesting sketches.
  • Designing the UI images, defining themes and specs, and obtaining feedback on designs, resulting in a style guide/design system and visual design mockups.
  • Developing the front-end UI based on finalized designs to provide a complete and usable experience, following a defined style guide.

The Double Diamond of Design

• The double diamond represents a design process to discover insight into the problem, define the area to focus upon
• Next develop potential solutions.
• Lastly deliver functional solutions.

Understanding the Problem Space

• When exploring the problem space, investigate: the current user experience, why a change is necessary, and how changes will improve the space.
• Articulating the problem space includes: team effort, exploring different perspectives, and avoiding incorrect assumptions and unsupported claims.
• An example of understanding the problem space is to consider what is problematic with existing navigation in cars; AR navigation is the result of decades of research in human factors for information displays.
• A workable solution that is both safe and trusted relies on a great understanding of the problem space.

Importance of Involving Users

• Developers used to communicate only with managers, experts, or proxy users, or rely on their own judgement.
• Getting input from the user who performs the activity on a regular basis is valuable.
• The best way to ensure the end product is usable and actually used involves users.
• Involving users leads to expectation management by setting realistic expectations, avoiding surprises and disappointments, delivering timely training, and practicing communication without hype.
• Involving users gives them a sense of ownership, making them active stakeholders. They become more likely to forgive or accept flaws, which can significantly impact product acceptance and success.

Degrees of User Involvement

• User involvement can range from:
  • A member of the design team, offering constant input but risking a loss of touch with general users.
  • Face-to-face groups or individual activities.
  • Online contributions from thousands of users through Online Feedback Exchange (OFE) systems, crowdsourcing design ideas, and citizen science.
  • Collecting user data after product release.

User-Centered Approach

• A user-centered approach focuses on users and their tasks by studying cognitive, behavioral, anthropomorphic, and attitudinal characteristics directly.
• User reactions and performance to scenarios, manuals, simulations, and prototypes are measured empirically and recorded.
• Problems found in user testing must be solved in iterative designs and have more tests.

User-Centered Design (UCD)

• UCD involves an iterative design process where designers focus on the users and their needs during each phase.
• Design teams involve users throughout the design process using research and design techniques to create accessible products.
• Investigative tools (surveys, interviews) and generative tools (brainstorming) are used to understand user needs.
• By focusing on user tasks and goals, UCD reduces their learning curve for a product and leverages their existing knowledge to maximize usability and value.
• The success of UCD products are traditionally judged by learnability, efficiency in use, and the satisfaction from a user's experience.

Four Basic Activities of Interaction Design

• Discovering requirements.
• Designing alternatives.
• Prototyping alternative designs.
• Evaluating the product and the user experience throughout.

Simple Interaction Design Lifecycle Models

• Discovering requirements, designing alternatives, prototyping, and evaluating all occur repeatedly before the final product is complete
• Google Design Sprints include the steps: Unpack, Sketch, Decide, Prototype and Test to iterate on design

Practical Issues

• Some practical issues include identifying: who the users and their needs are, how to generate alternative designs, how to choose between options, and how to integrate interaction design with lifecycle models.

Who are the Users/Stakeholders?

• Determining the users is not always obvious, as there can be many distinct types for a single product
• User can have different meanings, the product can be “everybody"
• Stakeholders are a larger group direct users
• Identifying stakeholders can identify groups to involve in interaction design activities.

What are the Users' Needs?

• Users rarely know what is possible
• Instead, explore the design space, investigate who the users are, investigate user activities, and try out ideas
• Focus on peoples' goals, usability, and user experience rather than expecting requirements.

How to Generate Alternatives

• Humans tend to stick with what works, but considering alternatives helps identify better designs.
• Alternative design inspiration sources:
  • Research and synthesis.
  • Cross-fertilization of ideas from different perspectives.
  • User-generated designs.
  • Product evolution based on changing use.
  • Inspiration from similar or different domains.
• Balancing constraints and trade-offs also generate alternatives.

Choosing Among Alternatives

• Interaction design focuses on externally visible and measurable behavior.
• Technical feasibility must occur. Evaluate options with users or peers, where prototypes are key.
• A/B Testing online, to inform choice between alternatives, requires setting appropriate metrics and choosing user group sets.
• The quality thresholds are set when different stakeholder groups have unique standards.

Integrating Interaction Designs

• Integrating interaction design activities in lifecycle models from other disciplines requires careful planning.
• Software development lifecycle models are most common.
• Integrating with agile software development is promising due it incorporating tight iterations, championing early feedback, handling new requirements, and aiming to balance flexibility and structure.

Key Points

• The four basic activities in the interaction design process are: discovering requirements, designing alternatives, prototyping and evaluating.
• User-centered design rests on the principles of: early focus on users and tasks, empirical measurement using quantifiable usability criteria, and iterative design.

User-Centered Design (UCD) Cons

• Negative Aspects Includes the possibility that it requires a lot of resources, and users are not necessarily designers.
• User research and testing activities also involve time and resources.
• Successful designs can come from talented developers who focus on the project and target audience from the outset without user input.
• Listening does help make efficient designs and improvements. However, it's been asked if that leads to new thoughts and ideas.

Differences Between Designs

• Human-Centered Design incorporates emotional or psychological preferences.
• Human-centered design designs with general natural characteristics and peculiarities of human psychology and perception.
• User-centered design is a more focused and concise version of human-centered design with target audience analysis.
• Activity-centered design is any purposeful human activity, featuring heavier emphasis on user activities with technology.
• Systems design is when the design focuses on defining the architecture, modules, interfaces, and data for satisfying requirements.
• Genius Design relies on the skills of talented designer

Information Architecture (IA)

• IA involves the way a website/app is structured and content organized to help users to find content and complete tasks.
• Provides website structure, application, project to allow users to understand where one is in relation to intended destination
• The four types of information needs are:
  • Exhaustive Research for everything regarding the design
  • Looking for one specific item
  • Needing to find design elements again
  • Exploratory projects to find a few good things