Interactive design principles-to be continued

We believe that the goal-oriented design method consists of 4 p, i.e. process, pattern, principles, practices (processes, patterns, principles, practices), and I will discuss the first 3 p.
Interaction design is generally a difficult and messy task, and interaction designers are often asked to imagine and define in a tight schedule a possible use of the latest technology, and no one has seen, we must have a deep understanding of the complex areas of products, must balance the competitive priorities, Must understand the constraints and opportunities of the technology used, as well as a clear understanding of the business environment of the project as a whole. These dizzying difficulties and challenges compel us to adopt a very systematic approach, through requirements, scenario scripts, personas, and research work, we know that we will get the right message so that we can answer the right questions at the right time, and we will get a predictable ability, And the audit trails that design decisions can follow, as well as patterns and principles, are also useful in making it unnecessary to waste time and effort on what is already well known.
But these processes, patterns, principles must be able to generate sparks of creation, the imagination of new situations, and the use of experience and judgment to evaluate the pros and cons of design. Creativity and good design judgment do not have a ready-made prescription, and it takes a considerable amount of hard work, diligence and skill to achieve it.
On the work of synergy, it is important to point out that there are three groups of people, and interaction designers should cooperate with them. The first category is business decision-makers who are responsible for the eventual success and profitability of the product and are often the ones who decide whether or not to invest in the job, so work closely with these people to start the product concept, define user research priorities, and requirements definition and framework definition phases. The involvement of business decision makers in the design refinement phase is also important because the trade-offs between the different scenarios may involve decisions about the development budget and time schedule. Second, the interaction designer also works with other members of the project team, including architects, users and marketing researchers, industrial designers, visual designers, authors of manuals, and so on, to ensure that all aspects of the user experience are aligned. The third category is the programmer and other technical experts, the purpose of the cooperation is to ensure that the design is perfect, design can adapt to the constraints of technology and cost, can take advantage of the opportunities offered by the technology and to be able to communicate effectively with the programmer.
Learning Interactive Design adheres to the principle of interactive design, and doing better interactive design is the mission of each interaction designer.

Interaction Design principles: Interactive design is not a figment of conjecture

Who are my users?

What are my users trying to achieve?

What do my users think of the products we want to implement?

What experiences do my users find attractive and rewarding?

How should my product work?

What form should my product take?

How does the user interact with the product?

How can my product functions be most effectively organized together?

How does my product look for first-time users?

How can my products be technically easy to understand, people like, and easy to control?

How do my products handle the problems that users are experiencing?

How does my product help the occasional user or novice user become more proficient?

How does my product provide sufficient depth and intensity for the expert level users?

Interaction design principles: The user interface should be based on the user's mental model, not on the implementation model
If the product's performance model fits the user's mental model very well, it eliminates some of the unnecessary complexity in the user interface by providing a cognitive framework that allows users to easily understand their goals and how they need to be met.

Interaction Design Principle: goal-oriented interaction reflects the user's mental model
The user's mental model does not have to be real or accurate, but it should enable users to work more efficiently, for example, most non-tech users imagine that the computer's screen is its heart, which is natural because the computer screen is what they stare at, The fact that CPUs are different from video displays does not help them think about how they interact with computers, even if they are technically more accurate.

Interaction Design principles: Users do not understand Boolean logic
Although Boolean logic is scientific and rational, any application that uses Boolean logic to interact with users is destined to encounter serious user interface problems, and why must they be used in another language that is not familiar, since they are skilled in using natural language? And what makes people hate is the need to redefine some keywords?

Interactive design principles: Do not replicate the mechanical era of the product user interface, but must be in accordance with the information age of the objective situation to improve

Interaction design principles: No one wants to stay at the novice level

Interaction design principles: Optimizing for intermediate users
Our goal is neither to attract beginners, nor is it pushing intermediate users to the expert layer, our goal has 3 aspects, namely first lets the novice quickly and painlessly become the intermediary user, secondly avoids to the person who wants to become the expert the barrier, the last most important lets the permanent intermediary user feel happy, Because their skills will be stable in the middle layer.

Interaction design principles: Think of the user as a very intelligent but very busy person
If the interface's performance model closely conforms to the user's mental model, it can provide the user with the required understanding without forcing the user to understand the implementation model. Turning a novice into an intermediary user requires a program to provide special help, and once you become an intermediary, this help can in turn hinder the user. This means that no matter what kind of help you provide, it should not be fixed in the interface, and this help should disappear when you no longer need the service.
Experts are also very important people because they have an unusual impact on inexperienced users. When a user thinks about a product, he will rely more on the expert than the intermediary, and follow the expert's advice, even if the recommendations do not apply, and the expert user is constantly and actively learning more content to learn more about the behavior of their own actions and procedures, and the relationships between expressions. Experts appreciate newer and more powerful features, and the mastery of the program keeps them from being distracted by increased complexity.
Permanent intermediary users know how to use the reference, so long as they do not have to solve all the problems at once, they have the motivation to study and study, which means that online help is the pole tool for the permanent intermediary, they use help through the index, so the index section must be very comprehensive.
Permanent intermediary users will determine their frequently used and rarely used features, users may experience some vague features, but will quickly identify the features they often use, and intermediate users often require that the tools in these common functions be placed at the front and center of the user interface for easy searching and memory.
Permanent and intermediate users are generally aware of the presence of advanced features, even though they may not need to or know how to use them, but the fact that the product has these advanced features assures the permanent intermediary user that it is the right choice to use this program for investment purchases.
At the same time, our products must also address the amateur and experts may encounter a variety of situations, but don't let such technical requirements affect your design philosophy, you must provide those features for expert users, and must provide support for novices, but must be half the talent, time, and resources for most of the users- Permanent intermediary user designed to provide the best interaction.

Interaction Design Principle: "What" interaction design, in the design of the product "how" behavior, first define the product to do "what"
What does the product look like when it is defined in the requirements definition phase, that is, what information and capabilities our user roles need to accomplish their goals? What is it? How to operate? How it feels to wait. In the absence of a clear definition of demand and a lack of unified understanding of what the problem is, we cannot evaluate the design of the proposed scheme, so we must explicitly design "what" interaction.

Interaction design principles: Five steps in the requirements definition phase
1. Creating a summary of issues and perspectives
2. Brainstorming
3. Persona expectations
4. Building Situational Scenarios
Scenario scenarios address the following questions, 1, what is the setting when the product is used? 2, will it be used for a long time? 3, are personas often interrupted? 4, is there more than one user on a single workstation or device? 5, what are the other products used with it? 6, what basic actions do personas need to do to achieve their goals? 7, what is the expected result of using the product? 8, how much complexity can be allowed based on the skill of personas and how frequently they are used?
5. Determine the need
Data requirements, functional requirements, other soil requirements, such as
1 Business requirements may include development time, rules, price structure, and business model
The 2 brand Mei experience needs to reflect the characteristics of the experience you want users or customers to associate with your product, company or organization.
3 Technical requirements may include weight, size, form elements, display, capability limitations and software platform selection
4 Customer and partner requirements may include ease of use, maintenance and configuration, cost and license agreement

Interaction Design principles: Qualitative research helps identify the behavior patterns of users and potential users faster, helping us understand
Product potential user behavior, attitude and ability (aptitude)
The technology, business, and context in which the product will be designed-problem domains (domain)
Vocabulary and other social aspects of the problem domain
Existing products and how to use them

Interaction Design principles: Qualitative research also helps solve the progress of design projects in the following ways
Provide a reliable and authoritative basis for the design team, as design decisions can be traced back to the findings
Unified Team understanding of problem domains and user concerns
Allows managers to make more comprehensive decisions on product design issues, otherwise this decision can only be based on guesswork and personal preference.

How does a product fit into the context of a user's life?
What are the basic goals for users when they use the product?
What basic tasks can help people achieve these goals?
What experiences are easy to draw attention to? What does the experience have to do with the product that will be designed?
What are some of the problems that users will encounter when they use the current method to complete the product's expected performance?

Interaction design principles: types of qualitative studies
Interview Stakeholder
Product initial imagination, budget and schedule, technology opportunities and constraints, business driven, stakeholder perceptions of users,
Interview subject matter expert.
Usually expert users, knowledgeable, but not designers, essential in complex or highly specialized fields, need to be subject to expert
Keep in touch throughout the design process.
Interview Customer
The purpose of their purchase, the problems they encounter under the current solution, the decisions they make when buying the products you design
Process, they are in the installation, maintenance and management of the product role, with the field-related issues and vocabulary.
Interview users
The information that is learned from the user includes the following
Products (if the current product does not exist, refers to similar systems) how to adapt to the user's life and work environment: When, why, to
And how to use the product.
Domain knowledge of the user's perspective: Includes existing products that need to be completed and not completed.
Current tasks and activities: include existing products that need to be completed and not completed.
The motivation and expectation of using the product.
Mental models: User perceptions of work, activities, and expectations of the product.
The use of existing products and setbacks (if the current product does not exist, refers to a similar system).
User observation, ethnographic field study
Literature Research
Product/prototype and competition review

Interactive design principles: User interviews and user observation
improved situational survey
Shorten interview process, reduce design team size, identify goals first, go beyond business scenarios
Personas assumptions
based on possible behavioral patterns and differentiating patterns The persona hypothesis attempts to solve the following problems at a higher level
what different categories of people might use these products?
How can their needs and behavior change?
What behavior scope and environment type do you need to study?
roles in the business and consumer areas
the information and common task sets required for different user types provide important initial organizational principles.
Behavior and demographic variables
people in the same business role definition may have different motivations for existence and different desires for future intentions, and behavioral variables can capture user data that must be collected first. For example, e-commerce sites, we may find the following related to purchase behavior range
Shopping frequency, often or infrequently
shopping hobby degree, like shopping or hate shopping
shopping motives, buy cheap or buy only need
environmental factors
Especially in the commercial product is the culture difference between the user organization
Organization plan
After creating the persona hypothesis, together with potential roles, behaviors, demographics, and environment variables, an interview plan must be developed to communicate with the person who is in contact with the negative present user

The principle of interaction design: The interviewer observes the following rules and gains a lot of useful qualitative data
1 interviews where the interaction takes place
2 avoid a fixed set of problems
prepare some of the standardized issues that must be addressed in the interview, although the list of issues will change as the interview progresses, Still helps to ensure that enough information is obtained each time to find a significant behavioral model. So as to facilitate interactive design.
Goal-oriented issues
Goal: What will make you happy all day? or bad.
Opportunity: What activities are currently wasting your time?
Priority: Which is the most important?
Information: What helps you make a decision?
System-oriented issues
Feature: What do you do most with your products?
Frequency: Which part of the product do you use the most?
Preferences: What are your favorite products and what are your favorites?
failed: How do you solve the problem?
Experience: What shortcut keys do you use?
Workflow-oriented issues
procedure: What was the 1th thing you did this morning? After that?
What happens and loops: How often do you do this? What is a monthly or weekly, but not every day
Special case: How a typical day is spent, and what is an unusual event?
Attitude-oriented questions
Expectations: What do you think of your future in 5 years?
Avoid: You don'tWhat do you want to do? What are you delaying?
Motivation: What are you most satisfied with about your job or your lifestyle? What are the problems that you often solve first?
3 first focus on goals, tasks second
to understand the reasons for user behavior-what motivates the behavior of different role individuals, and how they want to eventually reach their goals, rather than what tasks they perform. The final interactive design tracks the data to match the user's goals.
4 Avoid getting users to become designers
5 Avoid discussion technology
6 encourage storytelling
7 request demo and explain
8 avoid inductive issues

Interactive design principles: through questionnaires or open interviews to learn more about people to complete the status of specific tasks, task analysis should focus on the following aspects
1 Why the user performs the task, that is, the target behind the task
2 Frequent and important tasks
3 hint, what prompted the task to start executing?
4 Compliance Relationship-what is the condition of the task execution and what is the prerequisite for the completion of the task?
5 related personnel, their roles and responsibilities
6 Specific actions performed
7 Decisions made
8 information to support decision making
9 What are the problems-errors and contingencies
10 How the Ji Zheng These mistakes and accidents
After the questionnaire is completed or the interview is over, the task is decomposed into a flowchart or a similar form to show the relationship between the actions and the relationship between the person and the process. Although task analysis is to understand the user's current behavior, identify the difficulties and find an important way to improve opportunities, but here we give priority to the user's goals, and the user's current behavior is often the product of interacting with older systems and organizations, often in a way that is very different from what they like or the most effective behavior.

Interaction design principles: Based on qualitative data research support model, once you have a stable design ideas, to determine whether your design choices are effective, usability testing is an effective tool, and qualitative research can help you in the design of this difficult process to have a good start.

Interaction Design principle: Get the following information by constructing personas
1. Variables to identify and determine behavior
Activities: What users do, how often and how much work is done
Attitude: How users view products, areas and technologies
Ability: User's education and training level, user's learning ability
Motivation: Why users work in the scope of the product area
Skills: User skills in product area and technology
2. Access objects and behavioral variables to test
3. Discovering and identifying those significant patterns of behaviour
4. Integration of features and related objectives
5. Check for duplication and completeness
6. Describe properties and behavior in more detail
7. Designated persona types (first, secondary, supplemental, customer, service-accepted, negative)

Interaction Design principles: Workflow or sequence models are useful for capturing information flow and decision-making processes within an organization, and are often expressed as process tables that capture multiple phenomena. This method of work should be implemented.
1. The desired goal or result of a process
2. Frequency and importance of the process, and each action
3. What triggers or facilitates the process, and each action
4. Trust relationship, that is, the process that must be performed at a certain stage and each action, which process is dependent on the completion of the process and each action
5. Persons involved and their roles and responsibilities
6. Specific actions performed
7. Decisions taken
8. Information to support decisions
9. What errors-errors and exceptions
10. How errors and exceptions are corrected

Interaction design principles: defining an interaction framework
1 Define product shape factor, what product do you want to design? Study how much attention and product interaction the user will devote, and how the behavior of the product will react to the user's input;

2 define function and data elements;

3 Decide functional group and level, subordinate relationship;
The goal of grouping elements is better to help facilitate the process of personas in both tasks and at any time, thinking about the following questions:
Which elements require large areas and which do not need?
Which elements are containers for other elements (such as screens, frames, or grids)?
How does a container organize to optimize a workflow?
What is the order of a set of associated elements when they are used?
What interaction patterns and principles are used?
How does the psychological model of personas affect the organization of elements?

4 Draw a general interaction frame, wireframe, interactive prototype;

5 Construction of the key line scene flow, the wireframe design fully describes how the provided design helps users to accomplish their goals, describes the main paths that users frequently use the interface, processes, interactions between the user and the different functions of the component wireframe, and data elements, by designing more specific details that describe the user's actions and product responses.

6 Check your design by validating the situational test, such as clearing the database, configuring, and other special requests for interactive design.

Interactive Design principles: the design principles that function at different levels are, design value, concept principle, behavior principle, interface principle, the principle of most interaction design and visual design are applied across platforms, and the work load is minimized by applying the design principles of behavior and interface level


should adhere to the following design principles:


Design Value (Design principles guide behavior, its core based on a series of value concept);


integrity, no harm, (no interpersonal injury, psychological injury, physical injury, environmental injury, social, social harm) of the improvement of human place


(enhance personal, social and cultural understanding, improve individual and group effectiveness, and promote
between individuals and groups

communication, reduce the social and cultural tension between individuals and groups, promote economic, social, legal equality, and balance culture more


and social cohesion);


goal is clear, help users achieve their goals, get what they want, adapt to the use of situations and user capabilities;


is effective, realistic and feasible to help enterprises achieve their goals, adapt to business needs and technical conditions;


Elegance (graceful and graceful in form, precise and concise in science, efficient, ingenious and full of emotion, the most concise and complete solution,


excellent designers, less is more, the form of simplicity, perfection is not in the extreme, but is not to be cut, everything is


so; at the same time has the inner harmony, the excellent design lets the human feel is a whole, each part balanced harmoniously, the goal-oriented set


the product concept as the core and provides an ideal environment for creating inner harmony through iterative precise details; appropriately


adapt and mobilize cognition and emotion.


conceptual principles (used to define product definitions and how products fit into a wide range of usage scenarios);


behavior principle (describe the behavior of products in general situations and special situations);


Interface principle (description for specific activities or processes, different people have different mental models, but people rarely according to how the computer action mechanism to imagine their own mental model, each user naturally to the software how to perform tasks have a psychological imagination, The user uses this psychological imagination to look for the reason and then to understand the machine's behavior deeply.


(2) less is more;


Retains the functionality of the product while reducing the element of the interface. The minimalist approach to product design is to try to understand the purpose, and what are the goals that users of such products want to achieve? Without this, interactive products are a collection of confusing technical features, such as the Google search interface is a classic minimalist interface design in which each element of the interface is intuitive and meaningful; the IPod shuffle, Hog Bay software WriteRoom , but simply asking for simplicity--reduction is a balancing act, the need for a good understanding of the user's mental model, the aforementioned ipod is a bit strange, that is, with playback and pause to shutdown, with the menu key to boot, a classic relationship is visual simple can cause cognitive burden, in this case, These behaviors are easy to learn, and the error can be very small, so the impact on the success of the entire product is very small.


(3) allows users to directly manipulate the product rather than forcing users to discuss it with the product;


should not think of the interface as a dialogue with the user, the user is more willing to interact with the software and the car, the ideal interaction is not a dialogue, more like the use of tools.


(4) Tools on hand;


Tools for novice and intermediary users are generally available in toolbars or control panels, and tools can be used by keyboard commands for expert users.


(5) provides non modal feedback;


when you need to provide information or feedback to the user, there are many ways to express it, usually by popping a dialog on the screen, which is modal, which allows the program to be in a mode that must be handled before the user can continue the task before returning to normal. Usually notifies the user of a better way of modeless feedback (no matter when, the user's information is displayed in the primary interface and the system's normal task flow and interaction is not stopped). For example, in Word2003, you need to know how many words there are in a document, you must click the Word Count button from the toolbar, a dialog box appears, and if you want to return to work, you must click the Close button in the Word Count dialog box, which is a violation of modeless feedback. But the interaction changes in the Word2007.


(6) for possible design, ready for possible;


Programmers are judged by the ability to create software that handles multiple possibilities, while unlikely conditions are rife with complex logic systems, this does not mean that rare and unusual possibilities should be brought directly into the user interface, and that the abrupt appearance of marginal situations is a bad giveaway for programmers designing software, A dialog box that is used every day and not once a year, and control options appear on the interface.


(7) Provide situational information;


the process of displaying information may also be a process of disrupting user perception, the amount or value of which is often abused, and the expert on visual presentation says that the number of presentations should answer a question "compared with whom?" "The meaning of the information should be visualized, and the numbers are only supplementary."


(8) provides direct operation and graphics input;


software is often graphically explicit numeric information failure, and, more rarely, the software is fully capable of supporting image input, many software require users to enter numbers, and then the command to convert these numbers into graphics, few products let users paint, and then in the command of the image into a digital vector. When a list needs to be rearranged, the user may want to arrange it alphabetically, and may want to arrange it in a personal relationship, so they should be able to drag and drop the items directly into their desired order without interference from the algorithm.


(9) reflects the state of the object and the program;


(10) Avoid unnecessary reports;


(11) Do not use dialog boxes to report the normal content;


(12) Avoid blank state;


PowerPoint requires you to choose the underlying type every time you create a new slide, and it's better to remember the types or templates that you use frequently and recently, and as a default for new documents.


(13) Ask for forgiveness, not permission;


when it comes to interactive products, we often talk about "thinking," but that does not mean that the software should be intelligent and try to make the right decision by reasoning, instead, it should do what is probably right in most cases and provide users with powerful tools to help them make their first attempt. Instead of just giving the user a blank state, ask for it to be accepted, this way the application is not asking for permission, but is asking for forgiveness.


(14) to distinguish between commands and settings;


There is a huge difference between setting and starting a feature, the former may contain the latter, however, the latter should not contain the former, usually any one of the commands started 10 times, may be set 1 times, so it is best to make the user in 10 times a clear request settings, instead of 10 times in the 9 user refused to set the interface.


(15) offers choice, not questioning;


users do not like to be asked, continuous questioning to the user to hint at the characteristics of the program as follows, ignorance, forgetfulness, function is not strong, not active, not self-care, irritable, excessive demand.


(16) hides the joystick of the ejection seat;


(17) Optimize the response ability, adjust the delay time;


different interaction scenarios are very "expensive" due to response times you should propose as many interactive designs as possible in response time, as well as a design that adapts to situations that have been chosen and cannot be rolled back. When response time is unavoidable, communicating with the user provides them with the means to cancel the task, or to allow them to do other work while they are waiting.

To be continued msn:aleendesign@hotmail.com

Source: http://www.cssrain.cn/article.asp?id=1458