Understanding Good vs. Bad Design

Understanding Good vs. Bad Design

• Good design is effective, efficient, and enjoyable to use.
• Bad design is ineffective, inefficient, and frustrating to use.

Interaction Design

• The process of designing interactive systems, focusing on user experience and interaction.
• It involves understanding user needs and goals, creating user-centered designs, and iteratively testing and refining the design.

Accessibility and Inclusiveness

• Accessibility ensures that interactive systems are usable by people with disabilities.
• Inclusiveness makes systems usable by people from diverse backgrounds and abilities.
• Accessibility is not a usability goal, it is a fundamental right.

Usability Goals

• Learnability: How easy is it for users to learn the system?
• Efficiency: How quickly and easily can users perform tasks?
• Memorability: How easy is it for users to remember how to use the system after a period of disuse?
• Errors: How many errors do users make, and how severe are they?
• Satisfaction: How pleasant is the system to use?

Designing Principles

• Affordance: The perceived and actual properties of an object that suggest how it should be used.
• Consistency: Consistent use of elements and conventions throughout the system.
• Visibility: Making the system's functionality and state clearly visible to the user.
• Feedback: Providing users with timely and relevant information about the system's state.
• Constraints: Limiting the user’s possible actions to prevent errors.

Interaction Design Process

• Discover: Understand the user's needs, context, and goals.
• Define: Define the problem and scope of the project.
• Develop: Design, prototype, and test solutions.
• Deliver: Implement and launch the final product.

People-Centered Approach

• Emphasizes the importance of understanding and meeting the needs of users.

Four Basic Activities of Interaction Design

• Understanding: Gathering insights about users and their needs.
• Creating: Designing solutions that address those needs.
• Evaluating: Testing and refining the design to ensure it meets user requirements.
• Communicating: Presenting and explaining the design to stakeholders.

Conceptual Models

• Conceptual models represent the underlying structure and behavior of a system.
• Core Components: The key elements of a conceptual model (e.g., objects, actions, relationships).

Interface Metaphors

• Familiar concepts or objects that are used to represent and interact with digital systems (e.g., desktop, web page, shopping cart).

Interaction Types

• Responding: The system responds to user input (e.g., clicking a button).
• Conversing: The system interacts with the user through dialog (e.g., a chatbot).
• Manipulating: The user directly interacts with objects in the system (e.g., moving a file).
• Exploring: The user navigates through information spaces (e.g., browsing a website).

Design Implications of Cognitive Aspects

• Cognitive Load: How much mental effort is required to use the system?
• Memory: How easily can users recall information about the system?
• Attention: How effectively can users focus on the relevant information?

Cognitive Processes

• Perception: How users interpret information from their senses.
• Attention: How users focus on specific information or tasks.
• Memory: How users store and retrieve information.
• Reasoning: How users make decisions and solve problems.

Information Processing

• Encoding: Converting information into a format that can be stored in memory.
• Storage: Holding information in memory.
• Retrieval: Accessing information from memory.

Cognitive Frameworks

• Mental Models: An internal representation of how a system works.
• Gulf of Execution: The difference between the user's intention and the actions required to carry them out.
• Gulf of Evaluation: The difference between the user's expectation of the system's state and the actual system state.
• External Cognition: How people use external tools to augment their cognitive abilities.

This quiz explores the principles of good and bad design, particularly in the context of interaction design. It covers usability goals, the importance of accessibility, and how to create inclusive systems. Test your knowledge of these essential design concepts.