Saffer- Interaction Design, Chapts. 1, 2, 3

Saffer gives a rationale for, an understanding of, and a brief history of the field of Interaction Design in the first chapter. In the 2nd chapter, Saffer’s analysis of the four approaches to interaction design is very helpful, including: User-centered, Systems-centered, Activity-centered, and Genius Design. Of these, I notice that I gravitate towards user and activity centered approaches because it seems it’s primarily about what the user needs and how to facilitate that into happening.

The 3rd chapter considers the “basic elements” of interface design, and I really appreciate Saffer’s consideration of the element of “space”, that even though many interfaces are on screens and thus 2-dimensional surfaces, the interactions happen over time and can be understood as creating a kind of space. What the interface can give you is a visual representation of the space for interactions, and at best, it would be a kind of representation of 3-dimensional space.

The 3rd chapter also describes some “laws” of interaction design, which are principles that have emerged through practitioners and people in the field such as Moore’s Law, the Poka Yoke principle and so on. And this chapter concludes with Saffer’s roundup of the “characteristics of good interaction design” which I find to be pretty comprehensive, if not hard to design for:

The characteristics of good interaction design:  Trustworthy, Appropriate, Smart, Responsive, Clever, Ludic, and Pleasurable.

Obviously the arena of video games has influenced a new generation of educational designers to think about how to design educational applications that are in particular, more “ludic and pleasurable”.  But it is still yet to be defined how to best tie the ludic and pleasurable aspects of game interactions to the goals of learning educational content.  Good interaction design for education would be “ludic, pleasurable, and… educational?”

Schneiderman & Plaisant—Designing the User Interface, Chapt. 2

An exhaustive overview of guidelines, principles and theories for designing interfaces. Within this overview, the set of theories that focus on “context of use” and draw upon their relation to newer and more ubiquitous technologies are especially interesting for me.

There are 3 levels of consideration- 1) guidelines for practice, standards and concrete principles for application that have been developed through experience; 2) middle level principles, more widely applicable, fundamental and enduring principles that govern the design ; 3) high level theories, those that are descriptive of principles of design, and those that are predictive, providing rules and measures for outcomes.

Examples of Guidelines-
• To promote accessibility (provide text element for every non-text element, etc.)
• To organize the display (high level objectives to organize the display include, consistency of formats, fonts, colors, and so on; minimum memory load on user; compatibility of data input with data display; flexibility for user control of display, etc.)
• For getting the user’s attention (ex., intensity- use 2 levels, reserving the high intensity for important points; color- use up to 4 standard colors, etc.)
• For facilitating data entry (ex., consistency of data entry transactions; minimal memory load on users, etc.)

Middle Level principles- More fundamental principles but for which there may be many solutions. Looking here especially at the principle of universal usability and how to recognize the diversity among users.

Some middle level considerations:
• Accommodating user skill levels
• Task analysis (task objects & actions, maybe even schematized for different users)
• Interaction/Manipulation style- this can include 1. Direct manipulation, 2. Form Fill-in, 3. Menu selection, 4. Command languages, 5. “natural” languages

• And some middle levelprinciples: THE 8 GOLDEN RULES OF INTERFACE DESIGN-

1. Consistency (strive for consistency)
2. Provide informative Feedback for actions
3. Strive for universal usability
4. Dialog boxes to yield Closure
5. Prevent Errors
6. Allow for Reversability of actions
7. Support Internal Locus of Control
8. Reduce short term Memory Load

Theories-
Some theories are descriptive & explanatory, helping to develop consistent terminologies for objects and actions, while some theories are predictive, enabling designers to improve the capacity and functionality of designs. Another way to group theories is according to “motor task activities, perceptual activities or cognitive aspects”. There are different ways also to group theories. With descriptive theories, there have been systems that analyze the domain by separating concepts into “levels of analysis”…

Widget level theory and Pattern Languages
However, a more interesting approach is the “widget level”, that analyzes use and performance of “widgets” or interface tools. An interface analyzed as a set of organized widgets starts to yield some data and the perforance of future widgets can be predicted and tested. This process of repeated modeling and testing of organizations by widgets then starts to yield some patterns of usage, similar to Christopher Alexander’s idea of a “pattern language” in architecture (1977).

Context of Use Theories
Another group of related approaches, that build upon the idea that an interface can only be meaningful in terms of the patterns of its use, are the “context of use” theories that take more deeply into account the way humans are situated in physical and social environments and how this situatedness affects their interactions, their patterns of use. These ideas gave rise to renewed attention to Computer Human Interaction issues, and a seminal book was perhaps Suchman’s Plans and Situated Action (1987).
With context of use theories, the epistemological orientation is towards distributed cognition. Also users become even more important to the design process as the breakdowns they experience in using the interface are a source of insight about the design. Thus the attention to design and analysis of technology shifts away from the scientific setting into the “turbulence of actual usage” (95) in the context of the social environment.

Interestingly, these context of use theories are especially relevant to newer interface technologies such as physical/ubiquitous computing and embedded devices. “Physical space became an important notion for those who began to think more about ubiquitous, pervasive, and embedded devices. However, they sought to shift attention from place to space, implying that the social/psychological space had to be considered in addition to the physical place (Dourish, 2002). These notions are likely to become still more important as varied sensors become more common.” (94).

Shedroff- Information Interaction Design, a Unified Field

Shedroff defines “information interaction design” as, not surpisingly, the merger of 3 disciplines: information design, interaction design, and sensorial design. The result is the “content”.

The underlying goal of information interaction design could be described as “effective communication”, though Shedroff goes on to theorize about a continuum of communication which moves from data to information to knowledge to wisdom.  Thank goodness he backs off from trying to tackle “wisdom” too much.

Shedroff continues by taking each of these disciplines (information design, interaction design, & sensorial design) individually in that the particular issues and strategies of each are laid out. For example, Shedroff outlines 7 ways to categorize “information”- including alphabetically, numerically, by location, by time, by continuum, by categories, and by randomness.  I find this useful- and Shedroff also counters the idea that “metaphors” can be another way of organizing information. (Interesting! in that I often think in terms of the visual metaphor of the interface…)

When Shedroff examines interaction design, he first suggests that the best interaction he can think of is a “conversation”- a conversation had over dinner with a good friend, for example.  I’d perhaps agree (!).  But Shedroff also profers another useful outline, this time what he calls a “spectra of interactivity”.   This spectra charts the range of interactions and “conversations” that the system supports:  interactions that allow for feedback, control, creativity; co-creativity,  productivity, control, and adaptations.  Feedback and control allow the user to modify and tailor the site and get feedback for any actions taken; creativity/co-creativity and productivity allow  and assist the user in being creative, in creating new content, or making modifications to the site; adaptivity is more a response of the system to the input of the user, such as a game site that becomes progressively harder as the user becomes more skilled at playing.