Introduction

This module covers week 1 of the course.

Note that this material is subject to ongoing refinements and updates!

What is Interaction Design (IxD)?

Interaction design involves designing interactive products that support users in their everyday activities. It focuses on optimizing user interactions to align with their needs and activities. Key goals include creating usable products and involving users in the design process. Interaction design encompasses various disciplines, both within design (graphic design, product design, etc.), but also other disciplines such as engineering, ergonomics, psychology, and other social sciences. It is closer related to the older field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), but is seen as being broader in its scope.

Some well-known definitions:

IxD emphasizes multidisciplinary teamwork and has a significant presence in the business world, from small businesses through to large consultancies like Nielsen Norman Group, Cooper (Now known as Designit), and IDEO.

The following video from the Interaction Design Foundation helps to answer what IXD design is, and its relationship to UX:

Good and bad design

There are several examples of bad designs in everyday life! Many can be found at
Darnell M.J. (2021). Bad human factors designs. http://www.baddesigns.com.

What qualifies as "good design" should become more evident throughout this course, but think about why some of the digital products and services that you use are so successful.

What to design?

In this class, we will look at some examples of bad and good design, and throughout the course it should become clear what differentiates the two. However, when considering what to design, it is important to take into account:

• Who are the users?
• What are the users trying to accomplish?
• Where/how is the interaction taking place?

The User Experience (UX)

The user experience (UX) is central to interaction design, encompassing how users perceive and emotionally react to a product. UX was originally seen as an industrial application of IxD and HCI theory. An important aspect relevant to the user experience is usability. Usability goals include:

• effectiveness
• efficiency
• safety
• utility
• learnability
• memorability

We should aim to achieve desirable aspects of UX - for example, experiences that are enjoyable, motivating, fun, while trying to avoid experiences that are undesirable, such as those that are boring, frustrating, or unpleasant.

Accessibility

Accessibility is a crucial consideration, accommodating people with disabilities and ensuring a wide user base. Disabilities can be sensory, physical, or cognitive, and many of us can experience impairment that is situational or otherwise temporary.

Good design should aim to be inclusive, that is, creating designs that accommodate the widest number of people possible. Universal design and inclusive design, which are closely related, are two major areas of design research.

Though from a British context (the digital services of the National Health Service), the following video will give you some insight into how accessibility is considered in web and app design:

Key concepts in IxD

Feedback

Feedback that responds to user input is a crucial aspect of interaction design. Feedback can include sound, animation, highlighting, haptic feedback, or a combination of any or all of these.

Constraints

Constraints are key aspect of interaction, where the number of possible actions are limited. This helps to guide the user away from incorrect actions, and towards achieving their goals.

Consistency

Consistency is a key aspect to interaction design, and can be considered internally (within a single application), or externally (across several applications - so very rarely the case). An example of external consistency is how phones and remote controls place numbers in a different way to calculators and computer keyboards.

Affordances

Affordances, which indicate how objects are used, are essential in interface design, but in virtual interfaces, they are perceived rather than physical. Originally a term coined by psychologist James Gibson (1977), Donald Norman argues that interfaces have perceived affordances based on learned conventions of mappings between actions and effects, emphasizing the importance of designing intuitive and efficient user interactions.

Further reading:
Interaction Design Foundation (n.d.). What are Affordances? interaction-design.org/literature/topics/affordances

Design principles

Design principles guide interaction design, offering generalizable abstractions and constraints to shape user interfaces. Further examples will be given throughout the course, but one of the most famous examples in HCI is Jakob Nielsen’s Heuristics to improve UI Design (1994):

Further reading:
Nielsen, J. (1994). 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristic

Back to top | © Paul Haimes at Ritsumeikan University | View template on Github