User Involvement in Interaction Design: Ensuring Usable Products

1. Chapter 9 The process of interaction design

2. Fundamental activities • Understanding the requirements • Producing a design solution that satisfies those requirements • Producing an interactive version of the solution • Evaluating the design

3. User involvement • It is important to involve users in interaction design to ensure a development of usable products and that users will use them • Users’ activities, users’ goals • Expectation management • Ownership • Degrees of user involvement

4. Expectation management • The process of making sure that the users’ views and expectations of the new product are realistic • Involving users throughout development helps with expectation management because they can see from an early stage what the product’s capabilities are and what they are not

5. Expectation management • They will also understand better how it will affect their jobs and lives, and what they can expect to do with the product • Users can also see the capabilities develop and understand, at least to some extent, why the features are the way they are • Training is another approach for managing expectations

6. Ownership • Users who are involved and feel that they have contributed to a product’s development are more likely to feel a sense of ‘ownership’ towards it and be receptive to it when it finally emerges

7. Degrees of user involvement • Different degrees of user involvement may be implemented • Users may be kept informed through • Regular newsletters • Workshops

8. What is a user-centered approach? • Three principles that would lead to a “useful and easy to use computer system” (Gould and Lewis, 1985) • Early focus on users and tasks • Empirical measurement • Iterative design

9. Early focus on users and tasks • Understanding who the users will be (cognitive, behavioral, attitudinal characteristics) • Observing users doing their normal tasks, studying the nature of those tasks, and then involving users in the design process

10. Early focus on users and tasks • 1) Users’ tasks and goals are the driving force behind the development • What technologies are available to provide better support for users’ goals? • 2) Users’ behavior and context of use are studied and the system is designed to support them

11. Early focus on users and tasks • 3) Users’ characteristics are captured and designed for • 4) Users are consulted throughout development from earliest phases to the latest and their input is seriously taken into account

12. Early focus on users and tasks • 5) All design decisions are taken within the context of the users, their work, and their environment

13. Empirical measurement • Identify specific usability and user experience goals • Products can be empirically evaluated at regular stages as it is developed, to ensure that the final product is as intended

14. Iterative design • Iteration allows designs to be refined based on feedback • Iteration is inevitable because designers never get the solution right the first time

15. Four basic activities of interaction design • Identifying needs and establishing requirements for the user experience • Who target users are • What kind of support an interactive product could usefully provide • These needs form the basis of the products’ requirements and underpin subsequent design and development

16. Four basic activities of interaction design • Developing alternative designs that meet those requirements • Conceptual design describes what the product should do, what it should look like, and how it should behave • Physical designconsiders the detail of the product including colors, sounds, and images to use, menu design, and icon design

17. Four basic activities of interaction design • Building interactive versions of the designs • Paper-based prototypes

18. Four basic activities of interaction design • Evaluating what is being built throughout the process and the user experience it offers • Number of errors users make using it • How appealing it is • How well it matches the requirements • Iteration is one of the key characteristics of a user-centered approach

19. Some practical issues • Who are the users? • What do we mean by needs? • How do you generate alternative designs? • How do you choose among alternatives?

20. Who are the users? • Many interpretations of ‘users’ • Those people who interact directly with the product to achieve a task Holtzblatt and Jones (1993) • Those who manage direct users • Those who receive products from the system • Those who test the system • Those who make the purchasing decision • Those who use competitive products

21. Who are the users? • Stakeholders are “people or organizations who will be affected by the system and who have a direct or indirect influence on the system requirements” (Kotonya and Sommerville, 1998)

22. Stakeholders • The net of stakeholders is really quite wide • It is not necessary to involve all of the stakeholders in a user-centered approach, but it is important to be aware of the wider impact of any product you are developing • Identifying the stakeholders for your project means that you can make an informed decision about who should be involved and to what degree

23. Who are the users? • The group of stakeholders includes • Development team and its managers • Direct users and their managers • Recipients of the product’s output • People who may lose their jobs because of the introduction of the new product • etc.

24. Example • Design a travel organizer • User group: You • Stakeholders • People you are going to see • Airlines you book flight with • Staff in the hotels you might stay at • Restaurants on the route chosen for your journey

25. What do we mean by ‘needs’? • It is not simply a question of asking people, “What do you need?” and then supplying it, because people don’t necessarily know what is possible • Instead, we have to approach it by understanding the characteristics and capabilities of the users, what they are trying to achieve, how they achieve it currently, and whether they would achieve their goals more effectively and have a more enjoyable experience if they were supported differently

26. What do we mean by ‘needs’? • A user’s characteristics and capabilities may vary and will have an impact on the product’s design • Cognitive characteristics • Physical characteristics • Size of hands • Motor abilities • Height • Strength • Cultural diversity and experience

27. What do we mean by ‘needs’? • It is imperative that representative users from the real target group be consulted • New invention – imagine who might want to use and what they might want to do with it • It is always useful to start by understanding similar behavior that is already established

28. How do you generate alternative designs? • Normally, innovations arise through cross-fertilization of ideas from different applications, the evolution of an existing product through use and observation, or straightforward copying of other, similar products

29. How do you generate alternative designs? • Alternatives come from looking at other, similar designs, and the process of inspiration and creativity can be enhanced by prompting a designer’s own experience and by looking at others’ ideas and solutions • Design is a process of balancing constraints and constantly trading off one set of requirements with another, and the constraints may be such that there are very few viable alternatives available

30. How do you choose among alternative designs? • Design decisions will be informed by the information gathered about users and their tasks, and by the technical feasibility of an idea • Two categories of decisions: • Externally visible and measurable features • Internal system characteristics

31. External characteristics • Examples: • Building – ease of access, amount of natural light in rooms, width of corridors, number of power outlets • Photocopier – physical size, speed and quality of copying, different sizes of paper it can use

32. Internal characteristics • Examples: • Building – number of power outlets depends on: • wiring within the building • capacity of main power supply • Photocopier – choice of materials used in photocopier depends on: • its friction rate • how much it deforms under certain conditions

33. Interaction design • External characteristics – users’ viewpoint • It does take 30 seconds for the web page to load • It does take 1 hour for a cell phone text message to arrive • Internal characteristics – hidden from the users’ view • Technical decisions that influence why it takes 30 seconds for a web page to load

34. Interaction Design • The tasks that users will perform should influence design decisions no less than technical issues

35. How do you choose among alternative designs? • We choose between alternative designs by letting users and stakeholders interact with them and by discussing their experiences, preferences, and suggestions for improvement -> Prototyping • Another basis on which to choose between alternatives is ‘quality,’ but this requires a clear understanding of what ‘quality’ means -> Usability engineering

36. Prototyping • Prototyping involves producing a limited version of the product with the purpose of answering specific questions about the design’s feasibility or appropriateness

37. Usability engineering • Usability engineering involves specifying quantifiable measures of product performance, documenting them in a usability specification, and assessing the product against them

38. Lifecycle models: showing how the activities are related From: www.id-book.com

39. Summary Four basic activities in the design process 1. Identify needs and establish requirements 2. Design potential solutions ((re)-design) 3. Choose between alternatives (evaluate) 4. Build the artefact User-centered design rests on three principles • Early focus on users and tasks • Empirical measurement using quantifiable & measurable usability criteria • Iterative design Lifecycle models show how these are related From: www.id-book.com