What Is Interaction Design?

CHAPTER 2
WHAT IS INTERACTION DESIGN?

GOOD AND POOR DESIGN
• A central concern of interaction design is to develop interactive

products that are usable. By this is generally meant easy to learn,
effective to use, and providing an enjoyable user experience.
• A good place to start thinking about how to design usable interactive
products is to compare examples of well and poorly-designed ones.
Through identifying the specific weaknesses and strengths of different
interactive products, we can begin to understand what it means for
something to be usable or not.
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 Figure 1.3 Turn signal biking jacket
with the products. using e-textiles developed by
Leah Beuchley
WHAT IS INTERACTION DESIGN?
• 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.
• The focus of interaction design is very much concerned with practice,
i.e. How to design user experiences.
THE COMPONENTS OF INTERACTION DESIGN
WHO IS INVOLVED IN INTERACTION DESIGN?
• Designers need to know many different things about users,

technologies, and interactions between them in order to create
effective user experiences. At the very 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.
• Developers also need to understand the business side, the technical

side, the manufacturing side, and the 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 mostly carried out by multidisciplinary teams,
where the skill sets of engineers, designers, programmers,
psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, artists, toy makers, and
others are drawn upon. It is rarely the case, 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, its size, purpose, and product line.
INTERACTION DESIGN CONSULTANTS
• Interaction design is now widespread in product development. In
particular, website consultants, global corporations, and the computing
industries have all realized its pivotal role in successful interactive
products.
• 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 (e.G. Madgex) or mobile design (e.G. Cxpartners).
THE USER EXPERIENCE
• The user experience (UX) is central to interaction design. By this it is

meant how a product behaves and is used by people in the real
world.
• Nielsen and norman define it as encompassing “all aspects of the
end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”
THE PROCESS OF INTERACTION DESIGN
THE PROCESS OF INTERACTION DESIGN INVOLVES FOUR BASIC

ACTIVITIES:
1. ESTABLISHING REQUIREMENTS
2. DESIGNING ALTERNATIVES
3. PROTOTYPING
4. EVALUATING.
USABILITY GOALS
• Usability refers to ensuring that interactive products are easy to learn,
effective to use, and enjoyable from the user's perspective.
• More specifically, usability is broken down into the following 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
• Efficiency refers to the way a product supports users in carrying out their tasks.
• Safety involves protecting the user from dangerous conditions and undesirable
situations.
• 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.
• 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.
• Memorability refers to how easy a product is to remember how to use, once
learned.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
• Design principles are used by interaction designers to aid their
thinking when designing for the user experience. These are
generalizable abstractions intended to orient designers towards
thinking about different aspects of their designs.
• Design principles are derived from a mix of theory-based knowledge,
experience, and common sense. They tend to be written in a
prescriptive manner, suggesting to designers what to provide and
what to avoid at the interface – if you like, the dos and don'ts of
interaction design.

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CHAPTER 2

WHAT IS INTERACTION DESIGN?

• A central concern of interaction design is to develop interactive

• Designing interactive products

• Designers need to know many different things about users,

• Developers also need to understand the business side, the technical

• The user experience (UX) is central to interaction design. By this it is

THE PROCESS OF INTERACTION DESIGN INVOLVES FOUR BASIC

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