15 | “About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design” by Allen Cooper et. all
Chapter 1: Understanding Goal-Directed Design
The solutions developers come up with tend to be too technologically focused and difficult to use for the average consumer. Therefore, Cooper suggests a more human-oriented definition of design: understanding users’ desires, needs, motivations, and contexts as well as understanding business, technical, and domain opportunities, requirements, and constraints. Additionally, using this knowledge as a foundation for plans to create products whose form, content, and behavior is useful, usable, and desirable, as well as economically viable and technically feasible. He claims that design can provide the missing human connection in technological products and that is why it is so important to work it out. The problem with the creation of digital products today is that they are rude, require people to think like computers, and exhibit poor behavior. The three reasons why these products are so bad are the ignorance about users, conflicting interests such as that the programmer also has to design the product, and the lack of process meaning that there is no reliable, repeatable, predictable, and analytical way to do it. Interaction design is based on an understanding of users and cognitive principles so a systematic approach is possible. The first step in this approach is to recognize and address the goals and motivations of users. Therefore, we have to know the difference between tasks/activities and goals. A goal is an expectation of an end condition, whereas both tasks and activities are different steps that help people reach their goals. So by asking what the user’s goals are, we get one step closer to understanding the meaning of those activities to the users and thus are able to create more appropriate and satisfactory designs. Products with complex behaviors need a goal-directed design process that follows these six phases:
Research: ethnographic field studies, market research, field observation - behavior patterns, etc.
Modeling: domain and user models, creation of personas (main characters in the narrative) - composite user archetypes that represent distinct groupings of behaviors, attitudes, aptitudes, goals, and motivations
Requirements: context scenario (a “day in the life”), the personas’ skills and physical capabilites as well as the usage environment, outcome: balance of user, business, and technical requirements of the design to follow
Framework: overall product concept, visual design, interaction framework, general interaction design principles and patterns, input vectors, approximate form factors, visual framework & language strategy
Refinement: increasing focus on detail and implementation, interaction design: coherence, key path (walkthrough) and validation scenarios, system of type styles and sizes, icons, and other visual elements - visual hierarchy, form and behavior specifications
Support: adjustments, solutions, ... (more detailed in the image below)
The most important questions that should be answered in the process are:
Wo are my users?
What are my users trying to accomplish?
How do my users think about what they’re trying to accomplish?
What kind of experiences do my users find appealing and rewarding?
How should my product behave?
What form should my product take?
How will users interact with my product?
How can my product’s functions be most effectively organized?
How will my product introduce itself to first-time users?
How can my product put an understandable, appealing, and controllable face ontechnology?
How can my product deal with problems that users encounter?
How will my product help infrequent and inexperienced users understand how toaccomplish their goals?
How can my product provide sufficient depth and power for expert users?
