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Chapter 1 W H AT I S I N T E R A C T I O N D E S I G N ? 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Good and Poor Design 1.3 What Is Interaction Design? 1.4 The User Experience 1.5 Understanding Users 1.6 Accessibility and Inclusiveness 1.7 Usability and User Experience Goals Objectives The main goals of this chapter a...

Chapter 1 W H AT I S I N T E R A C T I O N D E S I G N ? 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Good and Poor Design 1.3 What Is Interaction Design? 1.4 The User Experience 1.5 Understanding Users 1.6 Accessibility and Inclusiveness 1.7 Usability and User Experience Goals Objectives The main goals of this chapter are to accomplish the following: • Explain the difference between good and poor interaction design. • Describe what interaction design is and how it relates to human-computer interaction and other fields. • Explain the relationship between the user experience and usability. • Introduce what is meant by accessibility and inclusiveness in relation to humancomputer interaction. • Describe what and who is involved in the process of interaction design. • Outline the different forms of guidance used in interaction design. • Enable you to evaluate an interactive product and explain what is good and bad about it in terms of the goals and core principles of interaction design. 1.1 Introduction How many interactive products are there in everyday use? Think for a minute about what you use in a typical day: a smartphone, tablet, computer, laptop, remote control, coffee machine, ticket machine, printer, GPS, smoothie maker, e-reader, smart TV, alarm clock, electric toothbrush, watch, radio, bathroom scales, fitness tracker, game console . . . the list is endless. Now think for a minute about how usable they are. How many are actually easy, effortless, and 2 1 W H AT I S I N T E R A C T I O N D E S I G N ? enjoyable to use? Some, like the iPad, are a joy to use, where tapping an app and flicking through photos is simple, smooth, and enjoyable. Others, like working out how to buy the cheapest train ticket from a ticket machine that does not recognize your credit card after completing a number of steps and then makes you start again from scratch, can be very frustrating. Why is there a difference? Many products that require users to interact with them, such as smartphones and fitness trackers, have been designed primarily with the user in mind. They are generally easy and enjoyable to use. Others have not necessarily been designed with the users in mind; rather, they have been engineered primarily as software systems to perform set functions. An example is setting the time on a stove that requires a combination of button presses that are not obvious as to which ones to press together or separately. While they may work effectively, it can be at the expense of how easily they will be learned and therefore used in a real-world context. Alan Cooper (2018), a well-known user experience (UX) guru, bemoans the fact that much of today’s software suffers from the same interaction errors that were around 20 years ago. Why is this still the case, given that interaction design has been in existence for more than 25 years and that there are far more UX designers now in industry than ever before? He points out how many interfaces of new products do not adhere to the interaction design principles validated in the 1990s. For example, he notes that many apps do not follow even the most basic of UX principles, such as offering an “undo” option. He exclaims that it is “inexplicable and unforgivable that these violations continue to resurface in new products today.” How can we rectify this situation so that the norm is that all new products are designed to provide good user experiences? To achieve this, we need to be able to understand how to reduce the negative aspects (such as frustration and annoyance) of the user experience while enhancing the positive ones (for example, enjoyment and efficacy). This entails developing interactive products that are easy, effective, and pleasurable to use from the users’ perspective. In this chapter, we begin by examining the basics of interaction design. We look at the difference between good and poor design, highlighting how products can differ radically in how usable and enjoyable they are. We then describe what and who is involved in the process of interaction design. The user experience, which is a central concern of interaction design, is then introduced. Finally, we outline how to characterize the user experience in terms of usability goals, user experience goals, and design principles. An in-depth activity is presented at the end of the chapter in which you have the opportunity to put into practice what you have read by evaluating the design of an interactive product. 1.2 Good and Poor Design A central concern of interaction design is to develop interactive products that are usable. By this we mean products that are generally easy to learn, effective to use, and provide an enjoyable user experience. A good place to start thinking about how to design usable interactive products is to compare examples of well-designed and poorly designed ones. Through identifying the specific weaknesses and strengths of different interactive products, we can begin to 1.2 GOOD AND POOR DESIGN understand what it means for something to be usable or not. Here, we describe two examples of poorly designed products that have persisted over the years—a voice-mail system used in hotels and the ubiquitous remote control—and contrast these with two well-designed examples of the same products that perform the same function. 1.2.1 Voice-Mail System Imagine the following scenario. You are staying at a hotel for a week while on a business trip. You see a blinking red light on the landline phone beside the bed. You are not sure what this means, so you pick up the handset. You listen to the tone and it goes “beep, beep, beep.” Maybe this means that there is a message for you. To find out how to access the message, you have to read a set of instructions next to the phone. You read and follow the first step: 1. Touch 41. The system responds: “You have reached the Sunny Hotel voice message center. Please enter the room number for which you would like to leave a message.” You wait to hear how to listen to a recorded message. But there are no further instructions from the phone. You look down at the instruction sheet again and read: 2. Touch*, your room number, and #. You do so and the system replies: “You have reached the mailbox for room 106. To leave a message, type in your password.” You type in the room number again, and the system replies: “Please enter room number again and then your password.” You don’t know what your password is. You thought it was the same as your room number, but clearly it is not. At this point, you give up and call the front desk for help. The person at the desk explains the correct procedure for listening to messages. This involves typing in, at the appropriate times, the room number and the extension number of the phone (the latter is the password, which is different from the room number). Moreover, it takes six steps to access a message. You give up. What is problematic with this voice-mail system? • • • • • It is infuriating. It is confusing. It is inefficient, requiring you to carry out a number of steps for basic tasks. It is difficult to use. It has no means of letting you know at a glance whether any messages have been left or how many there are. You have to pick up the handset to find out and then go through a series of steps to listen to them. • It is not obvious what to do: The instructions are provided partially by the system and partially by a card beside the phone. Now compare it to the phone answering machine shown in Figure 1.1 The illustration shows a small sketch of a phone answering machine. Incoming messages are represented using marbles. The number of marbles that have moved into the pinball-like chute indicates the number of messages. Placing one of these marbles into a dent on the machine causes the recorded message to play. Dropping the same marble into a different dent on the phone dials the caller who left the message. 3 4 1 W H AT I S I N T E R A C T I O N D E S I G N ? Figure 1.1 The marble answering machine Source: Adapted from Crampton Smith (1995) How does the marble answering machine differ from the voice-mail system? • It uses familiar physical objects that indicate visually at a glance how many messages have • • • • been left. It is aesthetically pleasing and enjoyable to use. It requires only one-step actions to perform core tasks. It is a simple but elegant design. It offers less functionality and allows anyone to listen to any of the messages. The marble answering machine is considered a design classic. It was created by Durrell Bishop while he was a student at the Royal College of Art in London (described by Crampton Smith, 1995). One of his goals was to design a messaging system that represented its basic functionality in terms of the behavior of everyday objects. To do this, he capitalized on people’s everyday knowledge of how the physical world works. In particular, he made use of the ubiquitous everyday action of picking up a physical object and putting it down in another place. This is an example of an interactive product designed with the users in mind. The focus is on providing them with a pleasurable experience but one that also makes efficient the activity of receiving messages. However, it is important to note that although the marble answering machine is an elegant and usable design, it would not be practical in a hotel setting. One of the main reasons is that it is not robust enough to be used in public places; for instance, the marbles could easily get lost or be taken as souvenirs. Also, the need to identify the user before allowing the messages to be played is essential in a hotel setting. Therefore, when considering the design of an interactive product, it is important to consider where it is going to be used and who is going to use it. The marble answering machine would be more suitable in a home setting—provided that there were no children around who might be tempted to play with the marbles! Video Durrell Bishop’s answering machine: http://vimeo.com/19930744. 1.2 1.2.2 Remote Control GOOD AND POOR DESIGN Every home entertainment system, be it the smart TV, set-top box, stereo system, and so forth, comes with its own remote control. Each one is different in terms of how it looks and works. Many have been designed with a dizzying array of small, multicolored, and doublelabeled buttons (one on the button and one above or below it) that often seem arbitrarily positioned in relation to one another. Many viewers, especially when sitting in their living rooms, find it difficult to locate the right ones, even for the simplest of tasks, such as pausing or finding the main menu. It can be especially frustrating for those who need to put on their reading glasses each time to read the buttons. The remote control appears to have been put together very much as an afterthought. In contrast, much effort and thought went into the design of the classic TiVo remote control with the user in mind (see Figure 1.2). TiVo is a digital video recorder that was originally developed to enable the viewer to record TV shows. The remote control was designed with large buttons that were clearly labeled and logically arranged, making them easy to locate and use in conjunction with the menu interface that appeared on the TV screen. In terms of its physical form, the remote device was designed to fit into the palm of a hand, having a peanut shape. It also has a playful look and feel about it: colorful buttons and cartoon icons are used that are distinctive, making it easy to identify them. Figure 1.2 The TiVo remote control Source: https://business.tivo.com/ 5 6 1 W H AT I S I N T E R A C T I O N D E S I G N ? How was it possible to create such a usable and appealing remote device where so many others have failed? The answer is simple: TiVo invested the time and effort to follow a usercentered design process. Specifically, TiVo’s director of product design at the time involved potential users in the design process, getting their feedback on everything from the feel of the device in the hand to where best to place the batteries, making them easy to replace but not prone to falling out. He and his design team also resisted the trap of “buttonitis” to which so many other remote controls have fallen victim; that is one where buttons breed like rabbits— a button for every new function. They did this by restricting the number of control buttons embedded in the device to the essential ones. Other functions were then represented as part of the menu options and dialog boxes displayed on the TV screen, which could then be selected via the core set of physical control buttons. The result was a highly usable and pleasing device that has received much praise and numerous design awards. DILEMMA What Is the Best Way to Interact with a Smart TV? A challenge facing smart TV providers is how to enable users to interact with online content. Viewers can select a whole range of content via their TV screens, but it involves scrolling through lots of menus and screens. In many ways, the TV interface has become more like a computer interface. This raises the question of whether the remote control is the best input device to use for someone who sits on a sofa or chair that is some distance from the wide TV screen. Smart TV developers have addressed this challenge in a number of ways. An early approach was to provide an on-screen keyboard and numeric keypad that presented a grid of alphanumeric characters (see Figure 1.3a), which were selected by pressing a button repeatedly on a remote control. However, entering the name of a movie or an email address and password using this method can be painstakingly slow; it is also easy to overshoot and select the wrong letter or number when holding a button down on the remote to reach a target character. More recent remote controls, such as those provided by Apple TV, incorporate a touchpad to enable swiping akin to the control commonly found on laptops. While this form of touch control expedites skipping through a set of letters displayed on a TV screen, it does not make it any easier to type in an email address and password. Each letter, number, or special character still has to be selected. Swiping is also prone to overshooting when aiming for a target letter, number, or character. Instead of providing a grid, the Apple TV interface displays two single lines of letters, numbers, and special characters to swipe across (see Figure 1.3b). While this can make it quicker for someone to reach a character, it is still tedious to select a sequence of characters in this way. For example, if you select a Y and the next letter is an A, you have to swipe all the way back to the beginning of the alphabet. 1.2 (a) GOOD AND POOR DESIGN (b) Figure 1.3 Typing on a TV screen (a) by selecting letters and numbers from a square matrix and (b) by swiping along a single line of letters and numbers Source: (b) https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT200107 Might there be a better way to interact with a smart TV while sitting on the sofa? An alternative is to use voice control. Remote controls, like Siri or TiVo, for example, have a speech button that when pressed allows viewers to ask for movies by name or more generally by category, for instance, “What are the best sci-fi movies on Netflix?” Smart speakers, such as Amazon Echo, can also be connected to a smart TV via an HDMI port, and, similarly, the user can ask for something general or more specific, for example, “Alexa, play Big Bang Theory, Season 6, Episode 5, on the TV.” On recognizing the command, it will switch on the TV, switch to the right HDMI channel, open Netflix, and begin streaming the specific episode. Some TV content, however, requires the viewer to say that they are over a certain age by checking a box on the TV display. If the TV could ask the viewer and check that they are over 18, then that would be really smart! Also, if the TV needs the viewer to provide a password to access on-demand content, they won’t want to say it out aloud, character by character, especially in front of others who might also be in the room with them. The use of biometrics, then, may be the answer. 1.2.1 What to Design Designing interactive products requires considering who is going to be using them, how they are going to be used, and where they are going to be used. Another key concern is to understand the kind of activities people are doing when interacting with these products. The appropriateness of different kinds of interfaces and arrangements of input and output devices depends on what kinds of activities are to be supported. For example, if the activity is to enable people to bank online, then an interface that is secure, trustworthy, and easy to navigate is essential. In addition, an interface that allows the user to find out information about new services offered by the bank without it being intrusive would be useful. 7 8 1 W H AT I S I N T E R A C T I O N D E S I G N ? The world is becoming suffused with technologies that support increasingly diverse activities. Just think for a minute about what you can currently do using digital technology: send messages, gather information, write essays, control power plants, program, draw, plan, calculate, monitor others, and play games—just to name but a few. Now think about the types of interfaces and interactive devices that are available. They too are equally diverse: multitouch displays, speech-based systems, handheld devices, wearables, and large interactive displays—again, to name but a few. There are also many ways of designing how users can interact with a system, for instance, via the use of menus, commands, forms, icons, gestures, and so on. Furthermore, ever more innovative everyday artifacts are being created using novel materials, such as e-textiles and wearables (see Figure 1.4). Figure 1.4 Turn signal biking jacket using e-textiles developed by Leah Beuchley Source: Used courtesy of Leah Buechley The Internet of Things (IoT) now means that many products and sensors can be connected to each other via the Internet, which enables them to talk to each other. Popular household IoT-enabled products include smart heating and lighting and home security systems where users can change the controls from an app on their phone or check out who is knocking on their door via a doorbell webcam. Other apps that are being developed are meant to make life easier for people, like finding a car parking space in busy areas. The interfaces for everyday consumer items, such as cameras, microwave ovens, toasters, and washing machines, which used to be physical and the realm of product design, are now predominantly digitally based, requiring interaction design (called consumer electronics). The move toward transforming human-human transactions into solely interface-based ones has also introduced a new kind of customer interaction. Self-checkouts at grocery stores and libraries are now the norm where it is commonplace for customers to check out their own goods or books themselves, and at airports, where passengers check in their own luggage. While more cost-effective and efficient, it is impersonal and puts the onus on the person to interact with the system. Furthermore, accidentally pressing the wrong button or standing in the wrong place at a self-service checkout can result in a frustrating, and sometimes mortifying, experience. 1.3 W H AT I S I N T E R A C T I O N D E S I G N ? What this all amounts to is a multitude of choices and decisions that interaction designers have to make for an ever-increasing range of products. A key question for interaction design is this: “How do you optimize the users’ interactions with a system, environment, or product so that they support the users’ activities in effective, useful, usable and pleasurable ways?” One could use intuition and hope for the best. Alternatively, one can be more principled in deciding which choices to make by basing them on an understanding of the users. This involves the following: • • • • • Considering what people are good and bad at Considering what might help people with the way they currently do things Thinking through what might provide quality user experiences Listening to what people want and getting them involved in the design Using user-centered techniques during the design process The aim of this book is to cover these aspects with the goal of showing you how to carry out interaction design. In particular, it focuses on how to identify users’ needs and the context of their activities. From this understanding, we move on to consider how to design usable, useful, and pleasurable interactive products. 1.3 What Is Interaction Design? By interaction design, we mean the following: Designing interactive products to support the way people communicate and interact in their everyday and working lives Put another way, it is about creating user experiences that enhance and augment the way people work, communicate, and interact. More generally, Terry Winograd originally described it as “designing spaces for human communication and interaction” (1997, p. 160). John Thackara viewed it as “the why as well as the how of our daily interactions using computers” (2001, p. 50), while Dan Saffer emphasized its artistic aspects: “the art of facilitating interactions between humans through products and services” (2010, p. 4). A number of terms have been used since to emphasize different aspects of what is being designed, including user interface design (UI), software design, user-centered design, product design, web design, user experience design, and interactive system design. Interaction design is generally used as the overarching term to describe the field, including its methods, theories, and approaches. UX is used more widely in industry to refer to the profession. However, the terms can be used interchangeably. Also, it depends on their ethos and brand. 1.3.1 The Components of Interaction Design We view interaction design as fundamental to many disciplines, fields, and approaches that are concerned with researching and designing computer-based systems for people. Figure 1.5 presents the core ones along with interdisciplinary fields that comprise one or more of these, such as cognitive ergonomics. It can be confusing to try to work out the differences between them as many overlap. The main differences between interaction design and the other approaches referred to in the figure come largely down to which methods, philosophies, and lenses they use to study, analyze, and design products. Another way they vary is in terms of 9 10 1 W H AT I S I N T E R A C T I O N D E S I G N ? the scope and problems they address. For example, information systems is concerned with the application of computing technology in domains such as business, health, and education, whereas ubiquitous computing is concerned with the design, development, and deployment of pervasive computing technologies (for example, IoT) and how they facilitate social interactions and human experiences. Design Practices Graphic Design Academic Disciplines Product Design Artist-Design Ergonomics Psychology/ Cognitive Science Design Informatics Industrial Design Film Industry Interaction Design Engineering Computer Science/ Software Engineering Social Sciences (e.g., Sociology, Anthropology) Ubiquitous Computing Information Systems Human Factors (HF) Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Cognitive Engineering Cognitive Ergonomics ComputerSupported Cooperative Work (CSCW) Interdisciplinary Overlapping Fields Figure 1.5 Relationship among contributing academic disciplines, design practices, and interdisciplinary fields concerned with interaction design (double-headed arrows mean overlapping) BOX 1.1 Is Interaction Design Beyond HCI? We see the main difference between interaction design (ID) and human-computer interaction (HCI) as one of scope. Historically, HCI had a narrow focus on the design and usability of computing systems, while ID was seen as being broader, concerned with the theory, research, and practice of designing user experiences for all manner of technologies, systems, and products. That is one of the reasons why we chose to call our book Interaction Design: beyond human-computer interaction, to reflect this wider range. However, nowadays, HCI has greatly expanded in its scope (Churchill et al., 2013), so much so that it overlaps much more with ID (see Figure 1.6). 1.3 W H AT I S I N T E R A C T I O N D E S I G N ? Figure 1.6 HCI out of the box: broadening its reach to cover more areas 1.3.2 Who Is Involved in Interaction Design? Figure 1.5 also shows that many people are involved in performing interaction design, ranging from social scientists to movie-makers. This is not surprising given that technology has become such a pervasive part of our lives. But it can all seem rather bewildering to the onlooker. How does the mix of players work together? Designers need to know many different things about users, technologies, and the interactions among them to create effective user experiences. At the least, they need to understand how people act and react to events and how they communicate and interact with each other. To be able to create engaging user experiences, they also need to understand how emotions work, what is meant by aesthetics, desirability, and the role of narrative in human experience. They also need to understand the business side, technical side, manufacturing side, and marketing side. Clearly, it is difficult for one person to be well versed in all of these diverse areas and also know how to apply the different forms of knowledge to the process of interaction design. Interaction design is ideally carried out by multidisciplinary teams, where the skill sets of engineers, designers, programmers, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, marketing people, artists, toy makers, product managers, and others are drawn upon. It is rarely the case, 11 12 1 W H AT I S I N T E R A C T I O N D E S I G N ? however, that a design team would have all of these professionals working together. Who to include in a team will depend on a number of factors, including a company’s design philosophy, size, purpose, and product line. One of the benefits of bringing together people with different backgrounds and training is the potential of many more ideas being generated, new methods developed, and more creative and original designs being produced. However, the downside is the costs involved. The more people there are with different backgrounds in a design team, the more difficult it can be to communicate and make progress with the designs being generated. Why? People with different backgrounds have different perspectives and ways of seeing and talking about the world. What one person values as important others may not even see (Kim, 1990). Similarly, a computer scientist’s understanding of the term representation is often very different from that of a graphic designer or psychologist. What this means in practice is that confusion, misunderstanding, and communication breakdowns can surface in a team. The various team members may have different ways of talking about design and may use the same terms to mean quite different things. Other problems can arise when a group of people who have not previously worked as a team are thrown together. For example, Aruna Balakrishnan et al. (2011) found that integration across different disciplines and expertise is difficult in many projects, especially when it comes to agreeing on and sharing tasks. The more disparate the team members—in terms of culture, background, and organizational structures—the more complex this is likely to be. ACTIVITY 1.1 In practice, the makeup of a given design team depends on the kind of interactive product being built. Who do you think should be involved in developing • A public kiosk providing information about the exhibits available in a science museum? • An interactive educational website to accompany a TV series? Comment Ideally, each team will have a number of different people with different skill sets. For example, the first interactive product would include the following individuals: • Graphic and interaction designers, museum curators, educational advisers, software engineers, software designers, and ergonomists The second project would include these types of individuals: • TV producers, graphic and interaction designers, teachers, video experts, software engineers, and software designers In addition, as both systems are being developed for use by the general public, representative users, such as school children and parents, should be involved. In practice, design teams often end up being quite large, especially if they are working on a big project to meet a fixed deadline. For example, it is common to find teams of 15 or more people working on a new product like a health app. This means that a number of people from each area of expertise are likely to be working as part of the project team. 1.4 1.3.3 THE USER EXPERIENCE Interaction Design Consultancies Interaction design is now widespread in product and services development. In particular, website consultants and the computing industries have realized its pivotal role in successful interactive products. But it is not just IT companies that are realizing the benefits of having UXers on board. Financial services, retail, governments, and the public sector have realized too the value of interaction design. The presence or absence of good interaction design can make or break a company. Getting noticed in the highly competitive field of web products requires standing out. Being able to demonstrate that your product is easy, effective, and engaging to use is seen as central to this. Marketing departments are also realizing how branding, the number of hits, the customer return rate, and customer satisfaction are greatly affected by the usability of a website. There are many interaction design consultancies now. These include established companies, such as Cooper, NielsenNorman Group, and IDEO, and more recent ones that specialize in a particular area, such as job board software (for example, Madgex), digital media (think of Cogapp), or mobile design (such as CXpartners). Smaller consultancies, such as Bunnyfoot and Dovetailed, promote diversity, interdisciplinarity, and scientific user research, having psychologists, researchers, interaction designers, usability, and customer experience specialists on board. Many UX consultancies have impressive websites, providing case studies, tools, and blogs. For example, Holition publishes an annual glossy booklet as part of its UX Series (Javornik et al., 2017) to disseminate the outcomes of their in-house research to the wider community, with a focus on the implications for commercial and cultural aspects. This sharing of UX knowledge enables them to contribute to the discussion about the role of technology in the user experience. 1.4 The User Experience The user experience refers to how a product behaves and is used by people in the real world. Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman (2014) define it as encompassing “all aspects of the enduser’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.” As stressed by Jesse Garrett (2010, p. 10), “Every product that is used by someone has a user experience: newspapers, ketchup bottles, reclining armchairs, cardigan sweaters.” More specifically, it is about how people feel about a product and their pleasure and satisfaction when using it, looking at it, holding it, and opening or closing it. It includes their overall impression of how good it is to use, right down to the sensual effect small details have on them, such as how smoothly a switch rotates or the sound of a click and the touch of a button when pressing it. An important aspect is the quality of the experience someone has, be it a quick one, such as taking a photo; a leisurely one, such as playing with an interactive toy; or an integrated one, such as visiting a museum (Law et al., 2009). It is important to point out that one cannot design a user experience, only design for a user experience. In particular, one cannot design a sensual experience, but only create the design features that can evoke it. For example, the outside case of a smartphone can be designed to be smooth, silky, and fit in the palm of a hand; when held, touched, looked at, and interacted with, that can provoke a sensual and satisfying user experience. Conversely, if it is designed to be heavy and awkward to hold, it is much more likely to end up providing a poor user experience—one that is uncomfortable and unpleasant. 13 14 1 W H AT I S I N T E R A C T I O N D E S I G N ? Designers sometimes refer to UX as UXD. The addition of the D to UX is meant to encourage design thinking that focuses on the quality of the user experience rather than on the set of design methods to use (Allanwood and Beare, 2014). As Don Norman (2004) has stressed for many years, “It is not enough that we build products that function, that are understandable and usable, we also need to build joy and excitement, pleasure and fun, and yes, beauty to people’s lives.” ACTIVITY 1.2 The iPod Phenomenon Apple’s classic (and subsequent) generations of portable music players, called iPods, including the iPod Touch, Nano, and Shuffle, released during the early 2000s were a phenomenal success. Why do you think this occurred? Has there been any other product that has matched this quality of experience? With the exception of the iPod Touch, Apple stopped production of them in 2017. Playing music via a smartphone became the norm, superseding the need for a separate device. Comment Apple realized early on that successful interaction design involves creating interactive products that have a quality user experience. The sleek appearance of the iPod music player (see Figure 1.7), its simplicity of use, its elegance in style, its distinct family of rainbow colors, a novel interaction style that many people discovered was a sheer pleasure to learn and use, and the catchy naming of its product and content (iTunes, iPod), among many other design features, led to it becoming one of the greatest products of its kind and a must-have fashion item for teenagers, students, and adults alike. While there were many competing players on the market at the time—some with more powerful functionality, others that were cheaper and easier to use, or still others with bigger screens, more memory, and so forth—the quality of the overall user experience paled in comparison to that provided by the iPod. Figure 1.7 The iPod Nano Source: David Paul Morris / Getty Images 1.5 U N D E R S TA N D I N G U S E R S The nearest overall user experience that has all of the above is not so much for a product but for a physical store. The design of the Apple Store as a completely new customer experience for buying technology has been very successful in how it draws people in and what they do when browsing, discovering, and purchasing goods in the store. The products are laid out in a way to encourage interaction. There are many aspects of the user experience that can be considered and many ways of taking them into account when designing interactive products. Of central importance are the usability, functionality, aesthetics, content, look and feel, and emotional appeal. In addition, Jack Carroll (2004) stresses other wide-reaching aspects, including fun, health, social capital (the social resources that develop and are maintained through social networks, shared values, goals, and norms), and cultural identity, such as age, ethnicity, race, disability, family status, occupation, and education. Several researchers have attempted to describe the experiential aspect of a user experience. Kasper Hornbæk and Morten Hertzum (2017) note how it is often described in terms of the way that users perceive a product, such as whether a smartwatch is seen as sleek or chunky, and their emotional reaction to it, such as whether people have a positive experience when using it. Marc Hassenzahl’s (2010) model of the user experience is the most wellknown, where he conceptualizes it in terms of pragmatic and hedonic aspects. By pragmatic, it is meant how simple, practical, and obvious it is for the user to achieve their goals. By hedonic, it is meant how evocative and stimulating the interaction is to them. In addition to a person’s perceptions of a product, John McCarthy and Peter Wright (2004) discuss the importance of their expectations and the way they make sense of their experiences when using technology. Their Technology as Experience framework accounts for the user experience largely in terms of how it is felt by the user. They recognize that defining experience is incredibly difficult because it is so nebulous and ever-present to us, just as swimming in water is to a fish. Nevertheless, they have tried to capture the essence of human experience by describing it in both holistic and metaphorical terms. These comprise a balance of sensual, cerebral, and emotional threads. How does one go about producing quality user experiences? There is no secret sauce or magical formula that can be readily applied by interaction designers. However, there are numerous conceptual frameworks, tried and tested design methods, guidelines, and relevant research findings, which are described throughout the book. 1.5 Understanding Users A main reason for having a better understanding of people in the contexts in which they live, work, and learn is that it can help designers understand how to design interactive products that provide good user experiences or match a user’s needs. A collaborative planning tool for a space mission, intended to be used by teams of scientists working in different parts of the world, will have quite different needs from one targeted at customer and sales agents, to be used in a furniture store to draw up kitchen layout plans. Understanding individual 15 16 1 W H AT I S I N T E R A C T I O N D E S I G N ? differences can also help designers appreciate that one size does not fit all; what works for one user group may be totally inappropriate for another. For example, children have different expectations than adults about how they want to learn or play. They may find having interactive quizzes and cartoon characters helping them along to be highly motivating, whereas most adults find them annoying. Conversely, adults often like talking-head discussions about topics, but children find them boring. Just as everyday objects like clothes, food, and games are designed differently for children, teenagers, and adults, so too should interactive products be designed for different kinds of users. Learning more about people and what they do can also reveal incorrect assumptions that designers may have about particular user groups and what they need. For example, it is often assumed that because of deteriorating vision and dexterity, old people want things to be big—be it text or graphical elements appearing on a screen or the physical controls, like dials and switches, used to control devices. This may be true for some elderly people, but studies have shown that many people in their 70s, 80s, and older are perfectly capable of interacting with standard-size information and even small interfaces, for example, smartphones, just as well as those in their teens and 20s, even though, initially, some might think they will find it difficult (Siek et al., 2005). It is increasingly the case that as people get older, they do not like to consider themselves as lacking in cognitive and manual skills. Being aware of people’s sensitivities, such as aging, is as important as knowing how to design for their capabilities (Johnson and Finn, 2017). In particular, while many older adults now feel comfortable with and use a range of technologies (for instance, email, online shopping, online games, or social media), they may resist adopting new technologies. This is not because they don’t perceive them as being useful to their lives but because they don’t want to waste their time getting caught up by the distractions that digital life brings (Knowles and Hanson, 2018), for example, not wanting to be “glued to one’s mobile phone” like younger generations. Being aware of cultural differences is also an important concern for interaction design, particularly for products intended for a diverse range of user groups from different countries. An example of a cultural difference is the dates and times used in different countries. In the United States, for example, the date is written as month, day, year (05/21/20), whereas in other countries, it is written in the sequence of day, month, year (21/05/20). This can cause problems for designers when deciding on the format of online forms, especially if intended for global use. It is also a concern for products that have time as a function, such as operating systems, digital clocks, or car dashboards. To which cultural group do they give preference? How do they alert users to the format that is set as default? This raises the question of how easily an interface designed for one user group can be used and accepted by another. Why is it that certain products, like a fitness tracker, are universally accepted by people from all parts of the world, whereas websites are designed differently and reacted to differently by people from different cultures? To understand more about users, we have included three chapters (Chapters 4–6) that explain in detail how people act and interact with one another, with information, and with various technologies, together with describing their abilities, emotions, needs, desires, and what causes them to get annoyed, frustrated, lose patience, and get bored. We draw upon relevant psychological theory and social science research. Such knowledge enables designers to determine which solutions to choose from the many design alternatives available and how to develop and test these further. 1.6 ACCESSIBILITY AND INCLUSIVENESS 1.6 Accessibility and Inclusiveness Accessibility refers to the extent to which an interactive product is accessible by as many people as possible. Companies like Google and Apple provide tools for their developers to promote this. The focus is on people with disabilities. For example, Android OS provides a range of tools for those with disabilities, such as hearing aid compatibility to a built-in screen reader, while Apple VoiceOver lets the user know what’s happening on its devices, so they can easily navigate and even know who is in a selfie just taken, by listening to the phone. Inclusiveness means being fair, open, and equal to everyone. Inclusive design is an overarching approach where designers strive to make their products and services accommodate the widest possible number of people. An example is ensuring that smartphones are being designed for all and made available to everyone—regardless of their disability, education, age, or income. Whether or not a person is considered to be disabled changes over time with age, or as recovery from an accident progresses throughout their life. In addition, the severity and impact of an impairment can vary over the course of a day or in different environmental conditions. Disability can result because technologies are often designed in such a way as to necessitate a certain type of interaction that is impossible for someone with an impairment. Disability in this context is viewed as the result of poor interaction design between a user and the technology, not the impairment alone. Accessibility, on the other hand, opens up experiences so that they are accessible to all. Technologies that are now mainstream once started out as solutions to accessibility challenges. For example, SMS was designed for hearing-impaired people before it became a mainstream technology. Furthermore, designing for accessibility inherently results in inclusive design for all. Accessibility can be achieved in two ways: first, through the inclusive design of technology, and second, through the design of assistive technology. When designing for accessibility, it is essential to understand the types of impairments that can lead to disability as they come in many forms. They are often classified by the type of impairment, for example: • Sensory impairment (such as loss of vision or hearing) • Physical impairment (having loss of functions to one or more parts of the body, for example, after a stroke or spinal cord injury) • Cognitive (for instance, learning impairment or loss of memory/cognitive function due to old age or a condition such as Alzheimer’s disease) Within each type is a complex mix of people and capabilities. For example, a person might have only peripheral vision, be color blind, or have no light perception (and be registered blind). All are forms of visual impairment, and all require different design approaches. Color blindness can be overcome by an inclusive design approach. Designers can choose colors that will appear as separate colors to everyone. However, peripheral vision loss or complete blindness will often need an assistive technology to be designed. Impairment can also be categorized as follows: • Permanent (for example, long-term wheelchair user) • Temporary (such as after an accident or illness) • Situational (for instance, a noisy environment means a person can’t hear) 17 18 1 W H AT I S I N T E R A C T I O N D E S I G N ? The number of people living with permanent disability increases with age. Fewer than 20 percent of people are born with a disability, whereas 80 percent of people will have a disability once they reach 85. As people age, their functional abilities diminish. For example, people older than 50 often find it difficult to hear conversations in rooms with hard surfaces and lots of background noise. This is a disability that will come to most of us at some point. People with permanent disabilities often use assistive technology in their everyday life, which they consider to be life-essential and an extension of their self (Holloway and Dawes, 2016). Examples include wheelchairs (people now refer to “wearing their wheels,” rather than “using a wheelchair”) and augmented and alternative communication aids. Much current HCI research into disability explores how new technologies, such as IoT, wearables, and virtual reality, can be used to improve upon existing assistive technologies. Aimee Mullens is an athlete, actor, and fashion model who has shown how prosthetics can be designed to move beyond being purely functional (and often ugly) to being desirable and highly fashionable. She became a bilateral amputee when her legs were amputated below the knee as a one-year-old. She has done much to blur the boundary between disabled and nondisabled people, and she uses fashion as a tool to achieve this. Several prosthetic companies now incorporate fashion design into their products, including striking leg covers that are affordable by all (see Figure 1.8). Figure 1.8 Fashionable leg cover designed by Alleles Design Studio Source: https://alleles.ca/. Used courtesy of Alison Andersen 1.7 1.7 USABILITY AND USER EXPERIENCE GOALS Usability and User Experience Goals Part of the process of understanding users is to be clear about the primary objective of developing an interactive product for them. Is it to design an efficient system that will allow them to be highly productive in their work? Is it to design a learning tool that will be challenging and motivating? Or, is it something else? To help identify the objectives, we suggest classifying them in terms of usability and user experience goals. Traditionally, usability goals are concerned with meeting specific usability criteria, such as efficiency, whereas user experience goals are concerned with explicating the nature of the user experience, for instance, to be aesthetically pleasing. It is important to note, however, that the distinction between the two types of goals is not clear-cut since usability is often fundamental to the quality of the user experience and, conversely, aspects of the user experience, such as how it feels and looks, are inextricably linked with how usable the product is. We distinguish between them here to help clarify their roles but stress the importance of considering them together when designing for a user experience. Also, historically HCI was concerned primarily with usability, but it has since become concerned with understanding, designing for, and evaluating a wider range of user experience aspects. 1.7.1 Usability Goals Usability refers to ensuring that interactive products are easy to learn, effective to use, and enjoyable from the user’s perspective. It involves optimizing the interactions people have with interactive products to enable them to carry out their activities at work, at school, and in their everyday lives. More specifically, usability is broken down into the following six goals: • • • • • • Effective to use (effectiveness) Efficient to use (efficiency) Safe to use (safety) Having good utility (utility) Easy to learn (learnability) Easy to remember how to use (memorability) Usability goals are typically operationalized as questions. The purpose is to provide the interaction designer with a concrete means of assessing various aspects of an interactive product and the user experience. Through answering the questions, designers can be alerted very early on in the design process to potential design problems and conflicts that they might not have considered. However, simply asking “Is the system easy to learn?” is not going to be very helpful. Asking about the usability of a product in a more detailed way—for example, “How long will it take a user to figure out how to use the most basic functions for a new smartwatch; how much can they capitalize on from their prior experience; and how long would it take the user to learn the whole set of functions?”—will elicit far more information. The following are descriptions of the usability goals and a question for each one: (i) Effectiveness is a general goal, and it refers to how good a product is at doing what it is supposed to do. Question: Is the product capable of allowing people to learn, carry out their work efficiently, access the information that they need, or buy the goods that they want? 19 20 1 W H AT I S I N T E R A C T I O N D E S I G N ? (ii) Efficiency refers to the way a product supports users in carrying out their tasks. The marble answering machine described earlier in this chapter was considered efficient in that it let the user carry out common tasks, for example, listening to messages, through a minimal number of steps. In contrast, the voice-mail system was considered inefficient because it required the user to carry out many steps and learn an arbitrary set of sequences for the same common task. This implies that an efficient way of supporting common tasks is to let the user use single button or key presses. An example of where this kind of efficiency mechanism has been employed effectively is in online shopping. Once users have entered all of the necessary personal details in an online form to make a purchase, they can let the website save all of their personal details. Then, if they want to make another purchase at that site, they don’t have to re-enter all of their personal details. A highly successful mechanism patented by Amazon.com is the one-click option, which requires users to click only a single button when they want to make another purchase. Question: Once users have learned how to use a product to carry out their tasks, can they sustain a high level of productivity? (iii) Safety involves protecting the user from dangerous conditions and undesirable situations. In relation to the first ergonomic aspect, it refers to the external conditions where people work. For example, where there are hazardous conditions—such as X-ray machines or toxic chemicals—operators should be able to interact with and control computer-based systems remotely. The second aspect refers to helping any kind of user in any kind of situation to avoid the dangers of carrying out unwanted actions accidentally. It also refers to the perceived fears that users might have of the consequences of making errors and how this affects their behavior. Making interactive products safer in this sense involves (1) preventing the user from making serious errors by reducing the risk of wrong keys/buttons being mistakenly activated (an example is not placing the quit or delete-file command right next to the save command on a menu) and (2) providing users with various means of recovery should they make errors, such as an undo function. Safe interactive systems should engender confidence and allow the user the opportunity to explore the interface to try new operations (see Figure 1.9a). Another safety mechanism is confirming dialog boxes that give users another chance to consider their intentions (a well-known example is the appearance of a dialog box after issuing the command to delete everything in the trash, saying: “Are you sure you want to remove the items in the Trash permanently?”) (see Figure 1.9b). Question: What is the range of errors that are possible using the product, and what measures are there to permit users to recover easily from them? (iv) Utility refers to the extent to which the product provides the right kind of functionality so that users can do what they need or want to do. An example of a product with high utility is an accounting software package that provides a powerful computational tool that accountants can use to work out tax returns. An example of a product with low utility is a software drawing tool that does not allow users to draw freehand but forces them to use a mouse to create their drawings, using only polygon shapes. Question: Does the product provide an appropriate set of functions that will enable users to carry out all of their tasks in the way they want to do them? (v) Learnability refers to how easy a system is to learn to use. It is well known that people don’t like spending a long time learning how to use a system. They want to get started right away and become competent at carrying out tasks without too much effort. This is 1.7 USABILITY AND USER EXPERIENCE GOALS (a) (b) Figure 1.9 (a) A safe and unsafe menu. Which is which and why? (b) A warning dialog box for Mac OS X especially true for interactive products intended for everyday use (for example social media, email, or a GPS) and those used only infrequently (for instance, online tax forms). To a certain extent, people are prepared to spend a longer time learning more complex systems that provide a wider range of functionality, such as web authoring tools. In these situations, pop-up tutorials can help by providing contextualized step-by-step material with hands-on exercises. A key concern is determining how much time users are prepared to spend learning a product. It seems like a waste if a product provides a range of functionality that the majority of users are unable or unprepared to spend the time learning how to use. Question: Is it possible for the user to work out how to use the product by exploring the interface and trying certain actions? How hard will it be to learn the whole set of functions in this way? (vi) Memorability refers to how easy a product is to remember how to use, once learned. This is especially important for interactive products that are used infrequently. If users haven’t used an operation for a few months or longer, they should be able to remember or at least rapidly be reminded how to use it. Users shouldn’t have to keep relearning how to carry 21 22 1 W H AT I S I N T E R A C T I O N D E S I G N ? out tasks. Unfortunately, this tends to happen when the operations required to be learned are obscure, illogical, or poorly sequenced. Users need to be helped to remember how to do tasks. There are many ways of designing the interaction to support this. For example, users can be helped to remember the sequence of operations at different stages of a task through contextualized icons, meaningful command names, and menu options. Also, structuring options and icons so that they are placed in relevant categories of options, for example, placing all of the drawing tools in the same place on the screen, can help the user remember where to look to find a particular tool at a given stage of a task. Question: What types of interface support have been provided to help users remember how to carry out tasks, especially for products and operations they use infrequently? In addition to couching usability goals in terms of specific questions, they are turned into usability criteria. These are specific objectives that enable the usability of a product to be assessed in terms of how it can improve (or not improve) a user’s performance. Examples of commonly used usability criteria are time to complete a task (efficiency), time to learn a task (learnability), and the number of errors made when carrying out a given task over time (memorability). These can provide quantitative indicators of the extent to which productivity has increased, or how work, training, or learning have been improved. They are also useful for measuring the extent to which personal, public, and home-based products support leisure and information gathering activities. However, they do not address the overall quality of the user experience, which is where user experience goals come into play. 1.7.2 User Experience Goals A diversity of user experience goals has been articulated in interaction design, which covers a range of emotions and felt experiences. These include desirable and undesirable ones, as shown in Table 1.1. Desirable aspects Satisfying Helpful Fun Enjoyable Motivating Provocative Engaging Challenging Surprising Pleasurable Enhancing sociability Rewarding Exciting Supporting creativity Emotionally fulfilling Entertaining Cognitively stimulating Experiencing flow Undesirable aspects Boring Unpleasant Frustrating Patronizing Making one feel guilty Making one feel stupid Annoying Cutesy Childish Gimmicky Table 1.1 Desirable and undesirable aspects of the user experience 1.7 USABILITY AND USER EXPERIENCE GOALS Many of these are subjective qualities and are concerned with how a system feels to a user. They differ from the more objective usability goals in that they are concerned with how users experience an interactive product from their perspective, rather than assessing how useful or productive a system is from its own perspective. Whereas the terms used to describe usability goals comprise a small distinct set, many more terms are used to describe the multifaceted nature of the user experience. They also overlap with what they are referring to. In so doing, they offer subtly different options for expressing the way an experience varies for the same activity over time, technology, and place. For example, we may describe listening to music in the shower as highly pleasurable, but consider it more apt to describe listening to music in the car as enjoyable. Similarly, listening to music on a high-end powerful music system may invoke exciting and emotionally fulfilling feelings, while listening to it on a smartphone that has a shuffle mode may be serendipitously enjoyable, especially not knowing what tune is next. The process of selecting terms that best convey a u