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Interactive System Design: Key Steps and Principles

Gain an understanding of the key steps involved in the process of designing an interactive system. Explore principles, study and discuss designs, learn and apply methods. Presented by William Newman, an experienced designer and consultant.

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Interactive System Design: Key Steps and Principles

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  1. Processes of DesignFirst lecture:Interactive System Design 3 October 2003 William Newman

  2. Processes of Design: Overview Method: • Explore principles • Study and discuss designs • Learn and apply methods. Goal: gain an understanding all of the key steps in the process of designing an interactive system.

  3. My background • PhD (Imperial College) in Computer Science, 1968 • Six years at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 1973-79 • 15 years at Xerox Research Centre Europe (Cambridge) 1987-2002 • Mostly focused on designing experimental interactive software systems • and on design methodology research • Now working as an independent consultant • Plus occasional teaching

  4. Today’s Lectures • Design • What is it • Examples to discuss • Are there underlying principles? • Defining the design problem • Looking ahead…

  5. What are Interactive Systems? And what does it mean to design them?

  6. What is design? • Herb Simon:Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. • Designing material artefacts is like • Prescribing remedies to a sick patient • Devising a new sales plan for a company • Finding one’s way around a traffic jam…

  7. What have we designed recently?

  8. Even the Greats get it wrong! • Rashtrapati Bhavan -- Edwin Lutyens’ Viceroy’s Palace

  9. Alto: forerunner of today’s PC (1974) • 1 Mhz processor • 64Kbytes RAM • 2 Mbyte diskyet… • 5 Mbit Ethernet • 808-line display • 60 ppm laser printer • WYSIWYG text editor, graphics editors, windowed desktop… • See www.digibarn.com

  10. The Bravo Word Processor • Alto-based • Multi-font, almost WYSIWYG • Piece Tables • No menus or targets! • Type i to insert, d to delete, e to select all, etc. • The ‘edit’ problem • Exposed the Modes problem • Direct forerunner of Word

  11. See http://www.digibarn.com/stories/desktop-history/index.html The “Big Bushy Tree” of PC software ancestryPaths of design knowledge transfer

  12. Forget-Me-Not (Xerox Research Cambridge, 1993)

  13. What’s involved in design? • Recalling Herb Simon:Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. • Involving… • Satisficing • Finding alternative solutions • Hierarchic subdivision • Simulation

  14. test test reject retain heuristic heuristic known solutions Modelling what designers do • Creative thought involves trial-and-error and selection • See D. T. Campbell on Blind Variation and Selective Retention (1960)

  15. What this means for designers of interactive systems As designers, we need to know: • How to define and subdivide problems • Existing solutions and how [well] they work • Heuristics for varying existing solutions to solve new problems • How to evaluate solutions empirically • How to predict outcomes analytically As researchers, we need to make advances in all of these.

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