Implementation of Interaction Design

With an understanding of the basics of user experience in the last section, we move ahead to study how application of interaction design concepts can help companies develop superior user experience. Interaction design as a field forms a part of the growing prominence of Human- Computer Interaction (HCI), but covers only a part of HCI.

Interaction design, according to Dan Saffer, in his widely acknowledged book Designing for Interaction involves designing for all types of possible interactions between people, machines, and systems through a prior understanding of interaction behavior. The key approaches of interaction design (as shared in the book) include:

1. Focusing on users: The key premise for interaction design is that users care most about doing their tasks and achieving their goals. Designers need to be the advocates for users.
2. Finding alternatives: It involves designers planning to create an improvized ‘third option’ rather than choosing between undesirable ones. The plan is to think out-of-the-box to create completely new ideas which have never been seen or developed before.
3. Using ideation and prototyping: Brainstorming and developing multiple design prototypes rather than just a single prototype, since multiple prototypes can point to multiple solutions to create a single product.
4. Collaborating and addressing constraints: This approach discusses how designers typically work together to address business goals and meet deadlines.
5. Creating appropriate solutions: Designers should typically build solutions which can be used across multiple projects and replicated elsewhere (that is not just for a single context).
6. Drawing on a wide range of influences: Designers should bring together influences from multiple fields like psychology, ergonomics, engineering, architecture, art, etc.
7. Incorporating emotion: Emotions need to be included thoughtfully into design decisions, since without it a product would not connect with people.

Saffer shared four main approaches to interaction design:

1. User-centered design: It involves designers collaborating with users through every stage of the design process to incorporate their needs, preferences, and goals while building content and awareness.
2. Activity centered design: The design is focused on pre-decided tasks and actions.
3. System design: It focuses on the system’s inputs, outputs, processes, feedback loops, goals, etc., for developing the design.
4. Genius design: It emphasizes on the skills and knowledge of subject matter experts to develop instructional content.

With multiple techniques involved in managing and developing interaction design across the overall design process, we would study three most widely used techniques here.

1. Use case development: A use case is a written description of how users perform tasks on a website. The primary objective of a use case, as shared in Writing Effective Use Cases (one of the most popular books in this area by Alistair Cockburn), is to capture the behavior between key stakeholders.The primary actor initiates an interaction with the system to accomplish some goal. Different sequences of behavior or scenarios unfold, depending upon the particular requests made. Use cases are typically developed in text form, although they can be written using flow charts, sequence charts, petri nets, or programming languages.
2. Card sorting: It is a user-design technique which helps designers discover the best way of organizing concepts logically into categories by sharing index cards. Chosen user groups have to sort a series of cards into groups or clusters based on a logical flow of content or functionality. According to Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, card sorting “can provide insight into users’ mental models, illuminating the way that they often tacitly group, sort, and label tasks and content within their own heads.”There are two primary methods for performing card sorts. In open card sorting, the audience is given cards to organize content across a website where there are no pre-defined categories. This type of sorting is useful in situations where new content has to be developed. The other type is the closed card sorting where audience is given cards with the initial categories already defined and they need to place cards into these pre-defined groups. This technique is useful when firms are adding new content to an already existing structure of a website.
3. Prototyping: Prototyping as a concept is used across multiple industries and involves building a model (draft version) before designing the final system to test the concept or the process, understand shortcomings, and improvize to build a better final product. It is a big part of the lean development methodology, which helps entrepreneurs test and showcase ideas at a much cheaper cost to save time and investment.The two prominent types of prototyping deployed these days are: ‘Low–Fidelity Prototypes,’ which are paper-based and are typically hand-drawn mock-ups to printouts which are quicker to create and change but do not allow user interactions. The second one is ‘High-Fidelity Prototypes,’ which are computer based and closest to the final outcome. They are typically much more effective as they can let firms gauge interaction time and realistic responses, but at the same time, can be a bit more expensive.