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Well, when I think about products for everybody I think of facebook for example. It has a vast number of users so this is enough "everybody" for a beginning interaction designer I think. Though strangely, Facebook started with a very restricted target group: Students of the Harvard University. Slowly and controlled it was opened to more people. First Students of other elite US universities ("Ivy League"). Than all other US universities. Than Highschool students, employees of several big companys and finally it was open for everybody. I don't want to put them on a pedestal for great interaction design. I just want to illustrate that they are successful and did not "desgin for everybody". | Well, when I think about products for everybody I think of facebook for example. It has a vast number of users so this is enough "everybody" for a beginning interaction designer I think. Though strangely, Facebook started with a very restricted target group: Students of the Harvard University. Slowly and controlled it was opened to more people. First Students of other elite US universities ("Ivy League"). Than all other US universities. Than Highschool students, employees of several big companys and finally it was open for everybody. I don't want to put them on a pedestal for great interaction design. I just want to illustrate that they are successful and did not "desgin for everybody". | ||
What this illustrates as well is that it is always easier to add features. Removing them if you note that they don't help you is very hard. You can do so but nobody likes it. What if a function that you particularly use would disappears after an upgrade of your | What this illustrates as well is that it is always easier to add features. Removing them if you note that they don't help you is very hard. You can do so but nobody likes it. What if a function that you particularly use would disappears after an upgrade of your favorite software? People suffer incredibly if you take something away, even if the most of them would be better of it what they had would have never existing anyway. Strange, but thats the way it is. | ||
If you release a successful 1.0 Product you can still extend it in the 2.0 version even with features that are not very-super-crucial. But I write this to help you to release a successful 1.0 version so I did put emphasis on the simplicity. | If you release a successful 1.0 Product you can still extend it in the 2.0 version even with features that are not very-super-crucial. But I write this to help you to release a successful 1.0 version so I did put emphasis on the simplicity. | ||
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* Getting inspiration | * Getting inspiration | ||
You may think that it is not necessary to do research as you are a clever person who knows already a good bunch of stuff about what you design for. | You may think that it is not necessary to do research as you are a clever person who knows already a good bunch of stuff about what you design for. Cognitive Psychologist and UX Professional Don Norman rightly says: "we tend to project our own rationalizations and beliefs onto the actions and beliefs of others". In other words:You think others are like you. But the interesting thing is: they are not the same. So you need to find out via research. | ||
In the beginning of your Project the main research activity will be doing user research and getting to know the goals and problems of your users. Later on you will probably solve more specific problems and use more books and online | In the beginning of your Project the main research activity will be doing user research and getting to know the goals and problems of your users. Later on you will probably solve more specific problems and use more books and online resources to solve these problems. | ||
It is important to get to know what your users what to archive – what their goals are. Goals are not activities like using a feature in your product. | It is important to get to know what your users what to archive – what their goals are. Goals are not activities like using a feature in your product. | ||
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==Use what is already out there== | ==Use what is already out there== | ||
The easiest (though least exiting) way to get insights is researching for | The easiest (though least exiting) way to get insights is researching for resources you can use. Using existing resources is useful in later project stages when you need to solve specific problems and already know about your users goals. | ||
If the topic you want to work on is new for you it might be a good start to start with a book that offers an overview on the field of interest. It will help you as well to get to know the special terms that are used in a more specialized topic. This can be crucial: I often searched for papers of | If the topic you want to work on is new for you it might be a good start to start with a book that offers an overview on the field of interest. It will help you as well to get to know the special terms that are used in a more specialized topic. This can be crucial: I often searched for papers of other resources on the web. What often took the most itme was getting to know the name of what I was actually looking for. For a recent project on online collaboration in design I googled a lot about "Open Design", Collaborative Design" etc. finally I found out, that the term that gave me some interesting links was "open source design" – which was not what I would have guessed initially. | ||
This leads us to the very common possibility to use a search engine to find interesting sites on your topic. The UX community blogs a lot and there is a lot of stuff out there. | This leads us to the very common possibility to use a search engine to find interesting sites on your topic. The UX community blogs a lot and there is a lot of stuff out there. | ||
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In case you have a specific problem you can consider scientific papers. If you need an answer on questions like "what do people remember about their documents?" or "is bimanual interaction an advantage for navigating in virtural space?" than you should go for science! | In case you have a specific problem you can consider scientific papers. If you need an answer on questions like "what do people remember about their documents?" or "is bimanual interaction an advantage for navigating in virtural space?" than you should go for science! | ||
Reading papers may feel difficult | Reading papers may feel difficult when you start and often they contain graphs and numbers that tell you nothing at the first moment. But you will see that they all follow a common structure so after you got this you will easily find the parts that are of an interest for you - most likely the introduction telling what the paper is about and the conclusions about what they found out. | ||
What is especially cool about scientific papers is that the authors quote other authors findings and that the paper is again quoted by other researchers. So everything is connected – and once you found a paper that you like and find useful you get connections to all sorts of related papers. | What is especially cool about scientific papers is that the authors quote other authors findings and that the paper is again quoted by other researchers. So everything is connected – and once you found a paper that you like and find useful you get connections to all sorts of related papers. | ||
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Before you start brief tell again what the interviews are for. Some people may feel kind of "tested" on computer literacy or something like that. | Before you start brief tell again what the interviews are for. Some people may feel kind of "tested" on computer literacy or something like that. Tell them they don't need to worry and that hearing about problems will help you as much as anything else. | ||
The interview should be | The interview should be pleasant for the interviewee, so don't stretch it too long. Being a attentively and a good listener will help as well. | ||
The first steps are the most difficult but once the interviewee talks it usually runs smooth.So it is a good idea to start with some questios that are useful for you to know and have clear and simple answers like the profession, years of experience etc. | The first steps are the most difficult but once the interviewee talks it usually runs smooth.So it is a good idea to start with some questios that are useful for you to know and have clear and simple answers like the profession, years of experience etc. | ||
The important thing about the interview is that you ''don't'' ask specific and direct questions but open ones. So the answers you should | The important thing about the interview is that you ''don't'' ask specific and direct questions but open ones. So the answers you should aiming for are not "yes" or "no" but e.g. the ones the user can tell you experiences or explains you something. Often it will be useful to follow up something the user said. Asking why a decision was made in a specific way or how something works can reveal important facts. | ||
Here are some open Questions as an example | Here are some open Questions as an example | ||
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After doing so you should try to put your key findings in a few short sentences. An example is: ''"The goals of our potential users are to improve their CVs and to get known.'' | After doing so you should try to put your key findings in a few short sentences. An example is: ''"The goals of our potential users are to improve their CVs and to get known.'' | ||
Write down common problems as well so you | Write down common problems as well so you know which traps to avoid and where new solutions are needed. | ||
These key findings will guide you when you | These key findings will guide you when you create your designs, because you now know what you need to concentrate on. | ||
=Designing= | =Designing= | ||
Revision as of 14:16, 10 October 2010
A Students Guide to Interaction Design Solltest ihr irgendwetas ändern: bitte beachtet, dass eure Beiträge unter Creative Commons Lizenz stehen werden. If you change something, please note that this work and you edits are licensed under a Creative Commons
Licence: This work is licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.
Preface
goals: This guide is aimed at students who want to develop new products, services, software or websites. We cover the whole interaction design process in a brief and understandable way and enable students to understand the most important terms so that they can read the literature.
No-Goals: Include material that is non-relevant for practical work.
Foundations
Iterative Design Process
The iterative design process helps you to structure your design process. It is an easy to use cycle model, which steps you can follow. The Process of doing so is explained in this guide.
The steps are:
- Research: in which you gather informations about user goals, existing problems and already existing solutions.
- Formulating you goals: Helps you to know what you actually want to archive with your design (and what not!). This can be seen as belonging to research but it is crucial to make the research useful, so it's got its own bullet-point!
- Design: Is creating solutions for what you want to archive. You start with a broad design of that is fairly abstract and make your ideas more concrete over time.
- Testing: After you designed you need to test if your ideas work as you expected. This is can be a hard thing to do because some things that seem to be great turn out to be unsuitable for your users. Otherwise you will get all sorts of interesting insights that will help you in improving your ideas.
The model is called iterative because you will go through the all or a part of the steps several time. Doing all steps one after the other one time is known as an "iteration". Each time you do so, you improve your product and former abstract things will become more concrete.
The model can be applied for designing the general product as well as for designing a small feature. You don't need to do all steps each time you try to solve a problem. It is very common to design, test and refine the design based on the test's results to test again. But you should at least consider the possibility to research.
So what is all that good for? Following the steps helps you to understand your users by doing research. So you don't design for non-existing needs or interfaces nobody can use. It helps as well to be more creative at the end: by dealing with your users, you will see your designs from a new perspective and so develop new ideas.
A small Example
Imagine you design a new mobile phone. You can use the process that is suggested here to design the general product: You will research how people will use the phone, you will determine which features you need for meeting the users needs. Than you will design how all features work together in the phone and how it will look like. At the end you test it.
During this process you will see that you need to answer smaller questions like how to implement sending messages: Is it better to have different facilities for SMS, MMS and e-mail, or shall they be combined in one view so that the user can ignore the differences between the different techniques?
For getting to know how to deal with this you can again use the cycle model:
1) Find out how the users think about messages and how they use them.
You may find out that users think of their messages all in the same way when they get them but in technical terms when they write them
2) Write down what you need to keep in mind when you design
I want to design a unified view for incoming messages while still providing explicit control over self initiated or reply-messages
3)Than you design...
4)...and test.
Example:It turns out that your design was overall easy to use but that some users had trouble with selecting the message type while sending
What you do now is trying out different ways to make the type-selection easier, so you just repeat the "mini-cycle" of testing and design.
Usability Goals
The usability goals are a collection of the very basic user needs. They are broad, but you will have no trouble to understand them.
Utility
If your product's functionality matches the needs of your users and enables them to reach their goals it has a good utility.
You can find out your users needs and goals by doing "user research" which means that you apply some research methods. One of these methods is doing a special kind of interview with some users. I will cover this technique in a latter chapter.
Learnability
A good learnability exists if the users you target can use your product without putting a lot of effort learning. This is especially important for the very basic functions.
Ideally users don't have to bother about new concepts and unknown terms.
Learnability is what will be the first thing that comes into your mind if you think about interaction design. Paradoxically it is a principle that is ignored in many products: Industry often uses a lot of functions that diminish learnability and many student projects ignore learnablity and focus on efficiency. You can improve the learnability of your application by learning common principles of design like "visibility" or "consistency" and by testing your ideas with your users. Material for learning this will be provided in latter chapters.
Efficiency
Your product has a good efficiency if the user can archive a high productivity. This simply means he/she can do more in less time once it is known how one uses the product. Efficiency can be archived with optimizing the ways the functions are accessed and with providing additional ways of interaction like keyboard shortcuts. Efficiency is important, but in my experience it is easiely over-emphasized as one does not need to learn one's own designs and efficient stuff feels just great. But a command line interfaces or gestural interaction are cool and really efficient if you can use it but they need to be explicitly learned before they can be used. And the difficulties of learning are often underestimated by interaction design beginners.
Safety
Safety is protecting the user and his/her creations from undesired outcomes. Very basic is that you provide a product that does not crash and destroys the users data by doing so.
You should as well prevent that the user selects data-destroying functions by accident. E.g. putting the "save" and the "close" entry close to each other in a menu will cause data loss: if the user wants to save, he may press "no" after a dialog window appears: "don't bother me now. I want to save my data!" - and the data is lost, "close" was selected by accident and the dialog-window that was dismissed by choosing "no" was the final warning.
Even if you prevent accidental actions the users data is not save. Users may misunderstand the name of an action or just try out what the result will look like. Therefore you should provide an undo-facility. This means the user can do an action and if it turns out that this has been a bad idea it can be undone. This is a great feature that demands a bit of thinking when the code is written but it is worth it. As a side effect your application becomes more learnable as well: users are able to learn by doing without any worries.
Simplicity
When I say simplicity I do neither mean "ease of use" nor "looking shiny and smooth". The kind of simplity I mean in this chapter is implementing only the features that are important for your idea and to implement them in a way that they work together greatly. You should not add anything because it is a nice to have or one in ten people thought it would be useful. Every time you add a feature, you need to make it fit to the rest of your product. It potentially will make it slower, less solid and more difficult to use. And keep in mind: the ressources you use to add features (you are probably student so it is: time) can't be used for refining the really crucial features.
So how do you decide which features you are going to implement?
I don't have any instant solution. The most important is that you keep in mind that you should create a unique, easy-to use product that does do what it does greatly. During this course you will learn how to do user research to find out about the goals and problems of your users. Try to find out what really matters for all of them. If you see that you have two different groups of people, find out if they are similar enough to serve them one product. If they differ too much, say goodbye to one of them and design just for one of the groups - maybe you come back later to the other, but first concentrate on one thing.
But what about the products that are used by everyone? In case you want to design something like this you should not apply the suggestions above, right? Well, when I think about products for everybody I think of facebook for example. It has a vast number of users so this is enough "everybody" for a beginning interaction designer I think. Though strangely, Facebook started with a very restricted target group: Students of the Harvard University. Slowly and controlled it was opened to more people. First Students of other elite US universities ("Ivy League"). Than all other US universities. Than Highschool students, employees of several big companys and finally it was open for everybody. I don't want to put them on a pedestal for great interaction design. I just want to illustrate that they are successful and did not "desgin for everybody".
What this illustrates as well is that it is always easier to add features. Removing them if you note that they don't help you is very hard. You can do so but nobody likes it. What if a function that you particularly use would disappears after an upgrade of your favorite software? People suffer incredibly if you take something away, even if the most of them would be better of it what they had would have never existing anyway. Strange, but thats the way it is.
If you release a successful 1.0 Product you can still extend it in the 2.0 version even with features that are not very-super-crucial. But I write this to help you to release a successful 1.0 version so I did put emphasis on the simplicity.