Interactive Design Practical Guide: Interactive design for user-oriented usability

Article Description: Interactive Design Practical Guide Series One: the interactive design in our eyes.

Interactive Design (interaction, abbreviated IXD or IaD) is the design area for defining and designing the behavior of a man-made system. Artificial objects, i.e., artificial objects, such as software, mobile devices, artificial environments, services, wearable devices, and the organizational structure of the system. Interaction design is the interface (Wikipedia) that defines the way in which the human creation behaves (the "interaction", i.e. the way artifacts are reacted in a particular scenario). Interaction design is done by interacting with the interface and behavior so that users can use human artifacts to accomplish their goals.

From the user's perspective, interactive design is a way to make the product easy to use, an effective and enjoyable technology that is dedicated to understanding the target audience and their expectations, understanding the behavior of the user when interacting with the product, understanding the psychological and behavioral characteristics of the person, and including understanding the effective ways of interacting with each other, and to enhance and expand them. The interactive design also involves a number of disciplines, as well as communication with multiple background people.

In the practical Guide to interactive design, we believe that interaction design should be the creation of the interface between humans and computers, i.e. Man-machine interface (Human-computer Interface) (see figure below). The starting point of interactive design is to study user and Computer Communication (dialog), human mental model and behavior model, and on the basis of this research, design interface information and its interactive mode, use Man-machine interface to translate user's behavior to computer, translate the behavior of computer to the user, to meet the need of software use. So, interactive design, on the one hand, is user-oriented, when interactive design is the pursuit of usability (usability), which is the purpose of interaction design, another aspect of interaction design is computer-oriented, when we focus on "software engineering."

Interactive Design Model

User-oriented

According to the above, we mentioned the need to meet the needs of the software, the goal is what we call "usability." Availability refers to the degree to which a product can be effective, efficient, and satisfied to achieve a specific goal in a particular user's specific use situation (ISO9241). In our view, the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of which we are suing are the three progressive levels of usability:

Effectiveness: Effectiveness refers to the correct and complete degree to which a user accomplishes a particular task and achieves a specific goal. If the user does not accomplish their goal, then whether the experience is long time, easy or complex, the product may not be meaningful.

In the 90 's, a brand-name machine manufacturer launched a desktop that was pre-installed with a "my home" software. The software is a system-functional navigation software that arranges your computer's tools such as Office, music, movies, browsers, calculators, and so on in a metaphorical, graphical room. For example, if you want to listen to music, then you have to go to the bedroom and then click on the guitar, and if you want to use Word, you may need to click on the document on your desk. That was what the firm seemed to be appealing to consumers--which it thought would solve the problem of novice use of computers--but was denied by the market. Many consumers simply do not find the appropriate function to put where. So, when the function is not finished, the software is missing the effectiveness, even if the metaphor of the graphical room to do more lifelike, software prices are low and no consumer feel available, software also lost value.

Efficiency: High efficiency refers to the degree of ease and length of time that a user can accomplish a specific task and achieve a specific goal. This may involve a number of factors. For example, our software is starting too slowly and processing too slowly, which can affect the efficiency of the software. For example, using a more efficient call center system in a call center could result in more phone calls being processed by the operator every day.

For a website, a good information architecture is very effective for efficient promotion. A good information architecture makes it easier for users to find the information they want in a shorter time.

Both Flickr and Picasa are famous photo management sites. Flickr focuses more on the application of community, the user group relative to the photographic technology is better. and Picasa Focus on more personal albums, user groups relative to the photographic technology is also poor. Their home page is also very different. Flickr's login Home page is mostly community-related information, such as recent events, what photos your contacts have recently published, and the groups you participate in, among others. Another complex and methodical navigation allows advanced users to visit more Flickr features. By contrast, the Picasa homepage is basically just a list of all albums. In such a different way, Flickr is efficient for his user base, and Picasa is equally efficient for his user base. It's easy for different users to find what they want under their pages.

Flickr and Picasa's personal home page

In addition, reducing the user's cognitive burden is also a powerful measure to improve the efficiency of the software. Can the user less mechanical operation? Can you let users think less? Can you let the user not remember so many things?

Satisfaction: Satisfaction is the degree of subjective satisfaction and acceptance that users feel in the process of using software products. On the basis of effective and efficient use of software, users are given more "experience" and more content to consider. This is the real level of our interaction design. For example: We need to avoid user errors, but also to improve methods to enable them to recover from the error; we need to make software easy to learn, so that the novice quickly grow into intermediary users, so that the need for intermediary users to become experts; we need to make beautiful pages to make users like, we need to shape our brand style, so that users "worship" ...

Interactive design is the design of the software can provide interactive way to meet people's use of software three levels of demand. In other words, first of all, the software should be guaranteed to be effective, if it is not valid, everything is empty. Then, to ensure the efficiency of the software, although the software has completed his goal, then it can be on this basis, shorten the time to complete the goal or reduce the cognitive costs, and ultimately achieve the goal of increasing productivity. After completing these two points, we can continue to consider improving the software's satisfaction, which can be improved by some visual improvements, branding effects and creating new experiences (Apple has been a good example of this).

Oriented implementation

Interaction design is based on a link in software engineering, so when it comes to interactive design, especially in software engineering, it must involve the implementation-oriented part-the "engineering" we are talking about. The question of "engineering" involves three aspects:

Standardization: This refers to the work related to the interaction design, we need to meet the relevant standards and specifications. Standardization helps to improve product compatibility, interoperability, repeatability, security, and quality. For example, we might need to refer to the grid standard of the UED team or the vertical grid when making prototypes. In this way, for visual designers, they can reduce the burden of pixel alignment, for the front-end engineers, apply the appropriate code to complete the layout of the standard grid. Of course, there are many standards and norms, such as: Some companies have interactive guide-line, can maintain the overall product image consistency, reduce the user's cognitive burden.

Feasibility: This means that in the process of design interaction, consideration should be given to the feasibility of the technology. It is possible to include two levels: the first is that technology can be accomplished, and at a higher level it needs to be considered in the context of existing resources (time, manpower, technical capacity, etc.). We can design a tow-load action, but if this thing tells you to do it in a browser on a fake touchscreen phone, it's obviously not a viable interaction; If you tell this thing to load 100kb of data in the browser and lengthen the load time by an average of 7s, then this is probably not possible. Interactive designers need to participate in the implementation of the program to ensure that the implementation of the program is strictly committed to the original design, but also to prepare for the necessary modification of the program to ensure that the technology is feasible, of course, the modification should not hurt the original design of the complete concept.

Innovation: In fact, specifically, interactive design is about creating a new user experience that aims to enhance and expand the way people work, communicate and interact (interactive design-beyond human-computer interaction). While speaking of innovation, it may be easy to think of dazzling interactions, lots of animations, and so on, but don't forget "technology-driven innovation": innovation should be done as much as possible within the framework of the standardization and feasibility described above.

The implementation of these three points to each other, complementary, but also constraints on our interaction design work needs to be achieved within a certain range. Design for the user, consider implementation, together to be a smart interaction designer!

Achieve availability

We've just talked about the interaction design for the user as well as the pursuit of usability. And, usability has three levels of progression, they are: effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. So how to achieve the availability goal, that is to say, how to achieve these three levels of progression? The practical Guide to interactive design is our answer to this question. So, look forward to our serial bar!