Interaction Design and the User Experience
Don’t mind me. Just summarizing what I’ve been learning lately. But I feel a LOT of this could be applied to gaming, so maybe it might interest you as well.
Interaction design focuses on how people use and work with devices and other products, such as computers and smartphones, but also how they work with interfaces in general, such as that of smart watches and ATMs, anything with an interface. The context of interaction design is on users, activities and environments, with users focusing on physical, sensory and cognitive capabilities, while environments include not just location, but also the setting, nearby distractions, social context and cultural differences. Activities are normally split into simplicity and complexity, as well as how often they are repeated and whether they are shared by others.
Interactive design has several key characteristics. Firstly, it is iterative, the best designs require repetition of design cycles (from requirements to designing alternatives to prototyping to evaluation. Secondly its main influences are usability and the user experience (often shortened to UX) and most importantly, it features users throughout the design process. Users are the centre of Interaction Design.
What makes an interactive design great? Well, if there weren’t good interactive designers, we wouldn’t be sitting here, talking about it now, would we? Interaction design has two main areas: usability and user experience. Usability, as the name suggests, describes how well an interactive product or device can be uses. Its key points are effectiveness, efficiency, safety, utility, memorability and learnability. So basically, it’s whether you are capable of doing the task, how easily can you do it, how you can be prevented from making errors and how to recover from them, utility and features, how easy the interface is to remember and how easy the interface is to learn. User experience is based on how users enjoy using an interface or product, ranging from bad and unintuitive and frustrating to good and enjoyable to being almost transparent, the user gets the job done and takes the interface for granted.
There are several Design Goals that ought to be met when designing. Perceivability is how people can see, hear and sense how a product and its components are meant to be used. This used to be called visibility but that does not cover the use of other senses, as well as cognitive and physical traits. Consistency is, as the name suggests, sticking to patterns, rhythms and formulas throughout your design, keeping things the same and as expected. Affordance and constraints go hand in hand. Affordance is how an interface shows you how you can use it and what you can do. Constraints are the opposite, showing you the limits of the product and restricting what you can and can’t do. Finally, feedback informs a user of what they have done, letting them know whether they have successfully or unsuccessfully completed a task. These, alonside the usability goals from earlier, are measurable.
Interaction design has a specific cycle. You start off discovering requirements, finding out what users need. This can be done via direct or indirect observations, interviews, focus groups, questionnaires or even by studying documentation or other products, but involves the users or potential users throughout. Personas and storyboards will help capture these requirements and potential users.
When you have discovered your requirements, you need to design alternatives. Interactive design comes in many forms, split between symbolic and direct. For example, a command line interface or a programming language is a symbolic interface, while a graphical user interface like the Windows operating system is direct – you drag and drop files between folders and the computer does that for you. As well as those interfaces, there are also smart phone and mobile interfaces, virtual and augmented reality and sensory interfaces like voice control and haptic feedback. Wearable devices are also becoming more popular, like smartwatches.
When you design alternatives, you will need to create prototypes. Early on this may be a low-fidelity design, consisting of paper layouts, sketches and storyboards. Later on, you may develop high fidelity working prototypes. Low fidelity prototypes work best for simple layouts and getting your ideas across, while high fidelity ones are more for testing features and functions.
After you have created your prototype, you must evaluate its effectiveness. You can do so either in controlled environments like labs and wizard of oz-style trials, or in natural environments, such as field studies. There are also settings where users are not directly involved, such as cognitive walkthroughs, heuristics, analytics and predictive studies. In these cases, experts tend to take the place or represent users.
When you do an evaluation, you need to plan ahead. You need to work out the type of study you can do, the goals you want to achieve and the questions you want to answer, the people you will involve, the data you will collect. There are also ethical and legal concerns, and consent must be obtained from all who take part. Most likely, you will both gather quantitative data (such as times and numbers of mistakes) – usability data – and qualitative data, how people feel about the prototype – user experience data.
Your data must then be turned into information. Data needs to be gathered up and analysed, to see whether your requirements and goals were met and to see what needs to be changed. Statistics can help, but you need to be wary of the context involved. After all, an average might seem a bit off if you have a handful of anomalies in your data – perhaps a mode or median might be better?
Once your data has been analysed, you will be able to make recommendations and changes.
But this information needs to be presented to your fellow stakeholders. Other designers may want raw data, but a manager might only be interested in a quick recap. Context is key here.
Throughout the design process, you will need to evaluate, from basic concept stages to before the deployment of a product, and even during a product’s lifespan.
The design process of interaction design may be constantly changing, but it is always focused on usability and the user experience, it must always involve users and it is always iterative, with a cycle of finding requirements, designing alternatives, prototyping and evaluating your designs.