Designing Interactions: Chapter 2 - My Pc

Bill Moggridge


Moggridge, B. (2006) Designing Interactions, MIT Press, pp 75-151.

"Making things more humane for people" Bill Atkinson

"You iterate like that, testing, and then being willing to set aside and build from scratch again." Bill Atkinson

"It is the responsibility of the designer to help people understand what is happening!" Bill Verplank

"As interaction designers, we need to remember that it is not about the interface, it's about what people want to do!" Cordell Ratzlaff

Chapter 2
The sections by Bill Verplank (Ivrea and Stanford) and were most informative for me. They revealed a richness and depth to designing I had not previously considered.

This diagram, based upon Verplank's, has been incredibly useful in summarizing interaction:



This diagram has been beneficial to me in the dissemination of the design process involved in designing for interaction. The cycle of know/do/feel compliments a previous conceptual diagram describing a framework on how experiencing an interaction works I have used in my teaching since about 2003. (de los Reyes, 2002):



In this diagram there is a trigger to set off the interaction that leads to a resolution to the interaction. The user must first know what the trigger is to set the interaction off and how to set it off (do). The interaction is communicated by either/or aural, visual, tactile feedback leading to the final resolution. This resolution can be experienced emotionally, physically, sensory, cognitively and intellectually (feel).

Verplank explains this process as "The responsibility of the designer to help people understand what is happening!"

To know what exactly to do, a designer develops a map of the interactions that shows an overview of how it works. This path through the interactions shows what to do and what currently a user needs to know.

To be able to do, control needs to be given to the user to initiate the process of interaction. Users' can either be given continuous control through the handles/joysticks/input devices; or, discrete control through the use of buttons. The use of buttons delegate the control to the machine.

Finally, through feedback, the user feels an emotional response (resolution) to the interactive process through the media that is used.

Verplank goes onto to discuss a four-step paradigm for the Interactive Design Process:

• Motivation - errors or ideas;
  
• Meaning - metaphors and scenarios;
  
• Modes - models and tasks;
  
• Mappings - displays and controls.
  

This process can be summarized as:

• Step 1 - What needs to be achieved?;
  
• Step 2 - How to communicate the meaning;
  
• Step 3 - What does the user need to know?;
  
• Step 4 - How to make the interaction useable.
  

As well as the Verplank interview, the interview with Cordell Ratzlaff was also informative. Ratzlaff, designer of Mac OS X, believes that "design should be driven first by user needs and desires."

He goes on to state that an interface needs to be appropriate for the people using it and the task being performed. It's all about what people want to do!

Finally Ratzlaff discusses future interactive web technologies focusing upon agent based interfaces. People consume content is a statement he makes. But he suggests a future paradigm where there will be no transactional steps, everything will be performed by one agent. Unfortunately, all efforts so far have failed to achieve this.

References
de los Reyes, A. (2002) Flash Design for Mobile Devices, Hungry Minds Inc. p36

Designing Interactions: Forward

Bill Moggridge


Moggridge, B. (2006) Designing Interactions, MIT Press, pp xi-xix.

"It's about shaping our everyday life through digital artefacts - for work, for play, and for entertainment."

Forward
So Gillian Crampton Smith sets the scene for the entire book. Her forward to this excellent book contains some really useful observations and points on what makes good interaction design. Designing for sociability is a fifth imperative when designing. Designers use a language of implicit meanings when designing interfaces. This adds a rich meta-communication channel over direct functional communication, that in turn enhances our modern everyday life. It is this aspect of sociability in an interface that needs to be considered alongside designing good usability, utility, user-satisfaction and quality communicative functions. These can be assured with the reassuring feedback that should be central to good interactive design.

Crampton Smith goes into some fundamentals of design such as consistency, before discussing intuitive interaction. Obviously qualities of interaction must be appropriate to the context in which it operates. If that interaction is intuitive it minimizes conscious thought to operate the interface allowing the user to concentrate on the goal they wish to achieve. To get to that goal we as designers need to design not just for the aesthetics but equally for the behaviour of the interaction. She raises the temporal dimension as a factor to consider within design, which I find really useful. Collaboration is equally important within the design process.

Finally she raises the notion of perceptual psychology and interaction design. Through perceptual psychology the limits of interactions between entities are becoming understandable. But the "level of mood and meaning, of sociability and civility" are areas that still need more work.