IFD:Course Interaction Design: Difference between revisions

* [http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/000041.php great tips for your questions]

* [http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/extreme-user article concentrated on getting to know general fact about your users]

===Use what is already out there===

You can search for papers by using [http://www.google.com/scholar google scholar] or the [http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm ACM Library]. The search is free in both cases but just google scholar links sometimes directly to the papers while you need a membership for ACM. If your university has one, you are a lucky student! But even if you find a paper on ACM or google scholar links on a pricy database too you should give it a try and search specifically for that papers title. Often the researchers have published accessible versions on their webpages.

==Designing==

What you should be aware of is that there are some things that are "expensive" regarding our cognition. One of these things is learning new things and getting them into our long-term memory e.g. how you do a certain action in a program. An other is keeping things in short term memory. An example for this would be to remember which function you triggered previously or which item you copied into the clipboard.

[[File:Honeywell_round_thermostat.jpg|200px|thumb|thermostat]]

[[File:Warmwasserheizung.jpg|200px|thumb|This works like you think]]

If you are the engineer who build these systems it is totally clear for you how they work. As well it will be often the case that your mental model is differs from the one the users have. This itself is nothing to worry about and it happens all the time. But even if you are very clever you just can spot the problems that it can cause if you test your ideas with your users and see if they act like you intended.

==Basic Principles& Best Practices==

There are some principles in interaction design that should be followed. It is no crime to break the rules – but you should have a good reason to do so. During the years quite may of them emerged. I collected and explained the ones that I consider as important and easy to apply.

One way to ease the dealing with a something new is to suggests that it works similarly to something the user already knows. This is often done to transferring real world principles to software interfaces and is also known as using a "metaphor". Like metaphors in language the metaphor transfers some aspects while some are not transferred - thats often good: if you do otherwise and try to transfer every single aspect you often end up with a use that has no advantages over the real world thing the metaphor is drawing from but is far more difficult to use.  

Not offering feedback will confuse and frustrate users - immediate and well designed feedback will make them feel good as they feel in control of the system.

===Modeless Design===