DESIGN. (Chapter 04)

Transcription

1 DESIGN (Chapter 04) THE PROCESS OF INTERACTION DESIGN

2 Overview What is involved in Interaction Design? Importance of involving users Degrees of user involvement What is a user-centered approach? Four basic activities Some practical issues Who are the users? What are needs? Where do alternatives come from? How to choose among alternatives? How to integrate interaction design activities in other lifecycle models? 2

3 What is involved in Interaction It is a process: Design? a goal-directed problem solving activity informed by intended use, target domain, materials, cost, and feasibility a creative activity a decision-making activity to balance trade-offs Generating alternatives and choosing between them is key Four approaches: user-centered design, activitycentered design, systems design, and genius design 3

4 Importance of involving users Expectation management Realistic expectations No surprises, no disappointments Timely training Communication, but no hype Ownership Make the users active stakeholders More likely to forgive or accept problems Can make a big difference to acceptance and success of product 4

5 Degrees of user involvement Member of the design team Full time: constant input, but lose touch with users Part time: patchy input, and very stressful Short term: inconsistent across project life Long term: consistent, but lose touch with users Newsletters and other dissemination devices Reach wider selection of users Need communication both ways User involvement after product is released Combination of these approaches 5

6 What is a user-centered approach? User-centered approach is based on: Early focus on users and tasks: directly studying cognitive, behavioral, anthropomorphic & attitudinal characteristics Empirical measurement: users reactions and performance to scenarios, manuals, simulations & prototypes are observed, recorded and analysed Iterative design: when problems are found in user testing, fix them and carry out more tests 6

7 Four basic activities in Interaction Design 1. Identifying needs and Establishing requirements 2. Designing alternatives design 3. Building interactive versions of the designs(prototyping) 4. Evaluating designs 7

8 A simple interaction design lifecycle model Exemplifies a user-centered design approach Identify the people who will use the product, what they will use it for, and under what conditions they will use it. Identify conceptual model, task analysis, user analysis that must be met for the product to be successful. ideally through usability testing with actual users is important as quality testing is to good software development. Alternative This part of the process may be done in This part of the process may be done in stages, building from a rough concept (prototype) to a complete design

9 Some practical issues Who are the users? What do we mean by needs? How to generate alternatives How to choose among alternatives How to integrate interaction design activities with other lifecycle models? 9

10 Target Users

11 Who are the users/stakeholders? Not as obvious as you think: those who interact directly with the product those who manage direct users those who receive output from the product those who make the purchasing decision those who use competitor s products Three categories of user (Eason, 1987): primary: frequent hands-on secondary: occasional or via someone else tertiary: affected by its introduction, or will influence its purchase 11

12 Who are the stakeholders? Check-out operators Suppliers Local shop owners Managers and owners Customers 12

13 What do we mean by needs? Users rarely know what is possible Users can t tell you what they need to help them achieve their goals Instead, look at existing tasks: their context what information do they require? who collaborates to achieve the task? why is the task achieved the way it is? Envisioned tasks: can be rooted in existing behaviour can be described as future scenarios 13

14 How to generate alternatives Humans stick to what they know works But considering alternatives is important to break out of the box Designers are trained to consider alternatives, software people generally are not How do you generate alternatives? Flair and creativity : research and synthesis Seek inspiration: look at similar products or look at very different products 14

15 1 IDEO TechBox Library, database and website all-in-one Contains physical gizmos for inspiration 15

16 Slide 15 1 These images are no longer on ideo-com. Can we keep them on here? If not then please paste in Figure 9.4 Helen Sharp, 1/17/2015

17 The TechBox 16

18 How to choose among alternatives Evaluation with users or with peers, e.g. prototypes Technical feasibility: some not possible Quality thresholds: Usability goals lead to usability criteria set early on and check regularly safety: how safe? utility: which functions are superfluous? effectiveness: appropriate support? task coverage, information available efficiency: performance measurements learnability: is the time taken to learn a function acceptable to the users? memorability: can infrequent users remember how to achieve their goal? 17

19 Testing prototypes to choose among alternatives 18

20 How to integrate interaction design in other models Integrating interaction design activities in lifecycle models from other disciplines needs careful planning Several software engineering lifecycle models have been considered Integrating with agile software development is promising it stresses the importance of iteration it champions early and regular feedback it handles emergent requirements it aims to strike a balance between flexibility and structure 19

21 IxD in Practice

22 Agile development Short (one to three week) timeboxes of iterative ti development (sprint, iteration, ti cycle) Early and repeated customer/user feedback Re-prioritisation of work based on customer/user so that emergent requirements can be handled Many approaches, e.g. extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, DSDM 21

23 Agile UX Techniques AgileUX Google Design Sprint Lean UX 22

24 AgileUX Integrates techniques from interaction design and Agile software development AgileUX requires a change of mindset In Agile, as implementation proceeds: requirements are elaborated requirements are re-prioritised All techniques in UX are still relevant but when and how much needs re-thinking focus on product, not design, as deliverable cross-functional teams Three practical areas: user research, aligning work practices, documentation 23

25 User research Aims to characterise users through data collection and analysis Agile s timeboxing approach does not support long periods of user research User evaluations and some detailed work can be fitted within a timebox Some user research can be performed in iteration ti 0 (zero), before implementation ti starts t Ongoing programme of user research 24

26 Aligning work practices Designing a complete product upfront causes problems because of re-prioritisation Some upfront work is needed (technical and UX) Use a parallel tracks approach: create product vision before development starts do design work one iteration ahead of development some teams work two iterations ahead 25

27 Parallel tracks approach to AgileUX 26

28 Aligning work practices Advantages of parallel tracks approach: no design time wasted on features not implemented usability testing and contextual inquiry could be done on the same customer visit, saving time timely feedback on the designs was received from developers and customers Agile flexibility supports schedule changes if a problem is found Parallel l tracks is commonly used 27

29 Documentation Most common communication approach for UX designers Agile discourages this kind of communication, in favour of discussion Only use documentation where needed. Ask: Who will read it? Who will use it? What is the minimum needed? Is there duplication anywhere? How polished does it need to be? 28

30 Documentation: how polished? 29

31 Documentation: how polished? 30

32 Lean UX Making assumptions - typical questions might include: Who are our users? What is the product used for? When is it used? What situations is it used in? What will be the most important functionality? What s the biggest risk to product delivery? Testing out the assumptions by creating hypotheses An example: We believe that enabling people to save their progress at any time is essential for smartphone users. This will achieve a higher level of sign up completions. We will have demonstrated this when we can measure an improvement of the current completion rate of 20%. 31

33 Google Design Sprint Make revisions based on the first sprint and then re-iterate the last two phases (at a minimum). However, if the idea isn t gaining the traction that what had been expected; move further back and reiterate from there. Read further here: Make UX Design Process Agile Using Google s Methodology The 5 phases of Google s Design Sprint: 32

34 tailored design sprint 33

35 34

36 Design Patterns Capture design experience: a solution to a problem in a context can be instantiated in many ways: generative Patterns may be individual, in languages, in catalogues, galleries or libraries Patterns often are associated with software components, e.g. Github or platform websites Carousel pattern as example: 35

37 Design Patterns Insert Figure 12.5 (a) 36

38 Design Patterns Capture design experience, but that doesn t necessarily mean good design: anti-patterns: don t do it this way! dark patterns: deliberate tricks 37

39 Open Source Resources Components, frameworks, systems available free of charge Community-driven Available for interaction design: design pattern libraries Bootstrap framework 38

40 Open Source Resources 39

41 Tools for Interaction Design Tools support all aspects of the design process: creativity, it sketching, simulation, brainstorming, i library search, mindmapping, video capture Tools integrate together to speed up prototyping Interactive wireframes or mockups can be produced using, e.g. Balsamiq Axure Higher fidelity prototype can be produced by linking interactive wireframe to design pattern library with software components 40

42 Summary Four basic activities in the design process 1. Establishing requirements 2. Designing alternatives 3. Prototyping 4. Evaluating User-centered design rests on three principles 1. Early focus on users and tasks 2. Empirical measurement using quantifiable & measurable usability criteria 3. Iterative design 41

43 Summary AgileUX refers to approaches that integrate UX design and agile development it requires a change in mindset by designers and developers requirements are repeatedly re-prioritised, which aims to avoid wasted effort UX design activities need rethinking: when, how much, and how to take forward Alternatives to AgileUX: Google Design Sprint, Lean UX Design patterns present a solution to a problem in a context Open source resources, e.g. on Github, make development of standard applications easier and quicker A range of automated tools to support interaction design in practice is available 42