Week 1, 1st October, 2007

CMT 4210

Current Issues in Interaction Design :

We had a general introduction about the course. In this Dr. Bob Fields, the programme leader of the course introduced us to new terms used in interaction design and gave us an overview on which grounds we should start thinking. Usability as the key issue, Human computer interaction, user experience and social use of computing were the key areas of discussion. Study of behavior of the products and user related design are the key design factors in Interaction Design.

http://www.ixda.org/ A very interesting link to undertake discussions on interaction design and discuss about various topics related to design

Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge was also recommended for reading.

We had been given a task to find out about New Usability. What does it mean and how does it differ from the old Usability? What are the implication for theory and for practice in Interaction Design?

PDE 4210

The practical side of the course is held in this module. Introduction all round.

Dr. Andy Bardill, the director of programmes introduced us to this module and made us aware about certain good books on interaction design, which included:
The Design of Every day things by Norman D. , Emotional Design by Norman D. , Designing Pleasurable things by Jordan P. Importance of prototyping, functionality, Usability, Pleasure and emotion in the design.
Usability: -Learnability, Accessability, Easy to use, Aesthetics, Compelling.
Effectiveness:-Efficiency, Safety, Utility, Learnability, Memorability.
Assignment for the next week:
Five definitions for Interaction Design and meaning of the word EMPATHY.

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Week 2: 8th October, 2007

CMT 4210

Before New Usability we should know a little bit about Usability?

Usability is a term used to define how the products, designed by the designers behave when used by the users(common people). This can be defined by five quality components:\

• Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
• Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
• Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?
• Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
• Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?

Usability Testing is the common term used to judge the Usability of the product before the launch in the market.

New Usability?

Usability issues are increasingly demanding and complex, since emerging systems and applications have a broader user base, a wider range of uses and more demanding user expectations. Dramatically shortened product timescales, the explosion of digital media content and a move toward mass consumer markets has had the result that communications and computing products will be selected for their ability to deal with the latest content in a highly usable fashion.New applications-new areas of human activity and new metaphors and concepts is making difficult for designer’s to stick to old concepts.

As the user is becoming more and more aware usability issues has more and more demanding, this in my opinion has lead to a new term NEW USABILITY.

PDE 4210

Definitions of Interaction design:

1. Interaction Design signifies the prigmatic representation, aesthetic/sensory presentation and technological inplementation of computer supported perceptions(cignition and sensorics) and actions(actuator and visualization) in mixed media.

From: Interaction Design: Total Interaction and Practice of new paradigm for the design By :Gerhard M.(EDT) Buuran.

2. Interaction Design refers to the shaping of interactive systems with particular emphasis on their use qualities.

The aim of interaction Design is to produce good use qualities.

From: Human Computer Interaction-Issues and Challenges. By Qiyang Chen

3. Interaction design is the art of facilitating or instigating interactions between humans (or their agents), mediated by products. By interactions, I mostly mean communication, either one-on-one (a telephone call), one-to-many (blogs), or many-to-many (the stock market). The products an interaction designer creates can be digital or analog, physical or incorporeal or some combination thereof.

Interaction design is concerned with the behavior of products, with how products work. A lot of an interaction designer’s time will be spent defining these behaviors, but the designer should never forget that the goal is to facilitate interactions between humans. To me, it’s not about interaction with a product (that’s industrial design) or interaction with a computer (that’s human-computer interaction). It’s about making connections between people.

From: Dan Saffer, Experience Design Director at the Design Consultancy ADAPTIVE PATH, Specializing in Interaction Design

4. Interaction Design is a field and approach to designing interactive experiences. These could be in any medium (such as live events or performances …

www.nathan.com/ed/glossary/index.html

5. Interaction design is the key skill used in creating an interface through which information technology can be manipulated. As products and services are increasingly being created using information technology, interaction design is likely to become the key design skill of this century. It focuses on users attempting to complete a task or achieve an objective, using a tool (device) in a particular context

From: Design Council.org

From the above definitions we tried to figure out the best possible definition of interaction design which we think is the most suitable for the term ” Interaction Design “.

Interaction Design is a field and approach to designing interactive experiences. These could be in any medium (such as live events or performances). The aim of interaction Design is to produce good use qualities.
Interaction design is concerned with the behavior of products, with how products work.
It’s not about interactions with the product or interaction with the computer’s, its about making connections between people.

Empathy:

It is commonly defined as one’s ability to recognize, perceive and feel directly the emotion of another. Since the states of mind, beliefs, and desires of others are intertwined with their emotions, one with empathy for another may often be able to more effectively define another’s mode of thought and mood. Empathy is often characterized as the ability to “put oneself into another’s shoes”, or to in some way experience the outlook or emotions of another being within oneself, a sort of emotional resonance. (Wikipedia)

Prototyping:

Prototyping is the process of quickly putting together a working model in order to test various aspects of a design, illustrate ideas or features and gather early user feedback. Prototyping is often treated as an integral part of the system design process, where it is believed to reduce project risk and cost. Often one or more prototypes are made in a process of iterative and incremental development where each prototype is influenced by the performance of previous designs, in this way problems or deficiencies in design can be corrected. When the prototype is sufficiently refined and meets the functionality, robustness, manufacturability and other design goals, the product is ready for production.

What is prototyping? The link provides useful information on prototyping.

Experience Prototyping?

R.O.V. ( Remotely operated vehicle)

Our first project on the course, Designing Interaction for Underwater R.O.V. , Defining controls and the user interface for better Usability. It was divided into three parts: Camera, Observer and the controller. Protocol might be between the Camera and the controller.

We started defining the different roles of the remote and the camera, how thy will interact with each other. Then we started with a low fidelity prototype

A held a video camera connected by a long cable to a remote TV screen where the live picture was viewed by player B. Player B gave verbal instructions to player A to move right/left, forward/back, and up/down and gave separate verbal commands to direct the camera.

Custom made screen and the camera(which could move up and down, and rotate 180 degrees) . With the prototype we came to know about the functions of the buttons on the remote, the various functions which are required on the screen, the problems with the camera and the problems with the designs made by the product design students. All in all the first attempt was a real success.

Week 3, 15th october,2007

CMT 4210

Calm Computing:

Calm computing aims to reduce the “excitement” of information overload by letting the user select what information is at the center of their attention and what information is peripheral. The term was coined by Mark Weiser, chief technologist, and John Seeley Brown, director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Lab. Calm technology, they envision, will not only relax the user but, by moving unneeded information to the edge of an interface, allow more information to exist there, ready for selection when needed. An example: a video conference may be a calmer interface than a phone conference because the explicit visual knowledge of details that are peripheral gives participants more confidence in what can be focused on and what can be left at the edge. (Think of phone conferences in which participants are never quite sure who has entered or left the room at the other end. This lack of information is not necessarily calming!) Knowledge of the periphery gives us “locatedness” without unduly distracting us.

The key terms in calm computing are:

Engagement

Experience

Appropriation

www.equator.ac.uk/

http://oxygen.csail.mit.edu/Overview.html : David and Anoi gave presentation on the project oxygen by MIT labs.

PDE 4210

IDEO method cards:

Helps to streamline the study, ask questions to yourself and helps you in making decisions in your research. Each card is a method and explains us how that can be used effectively in our research/ study. There are 51 cards divided into 4 categories: learn, look, ask and try.

The method cards proved to be really usefull to us in our Gorilla study project where they helped us to streamline our discussions to relevant topics.

Paper Prototyping

Paper prototyping is a very hand and fast tool to actually test Your design. It is based on sketches on paper in which the designer designs the interface and tests it with his fellowmates. With a paper prototype you can easily identify the parts which are self explanatory and which are confusing and need to worked on. The most wonderfull thing is, it does not waste a lot of time and can be changed quite easily.

ELECTRONIC PHOTO LOCKET

Paper Prototyping was the first project in our next project ELECTRONIC PHOTO LOCKET in which we had to design the interface for an electronic device which was related to only pictures.

It could: View photos, delete photos, share photos and download photos, a dream feature could be added by us in the interface apart from these function.

The Challenge: The size of the photolocket was only 3cm x 3cm, so it was difficult to provide great deal of features in it

Week 4, 22nd october, 2007

CMT 4210

TANGIBLE INTERACTION

Tangible interaction is based on bodily/ embodied interaction, physical representation of the data based on the sense of touch.. Tangible interaction can be really very useful in User engagement.

Feel is the major factor in Tangible interaction. MICROSOFT SURFACE is a great example of tangible interaction.

Halil and I gave a presentation on Playpals:Tangible interfaces for remote communication and play and Pingpong plus: Design of an athletic-tangible interface for computer-supportive co-operative play

presentation-tangible-computing-by-halil-and-dikshit.pdf

PDE 4210

Not much happening in this session today.

Week 5, 29th october 2007

CMT 4210

Guest speaker: Paula Amaldi

Before the lecture she reccomended us to read “Electronic furniture for curious home:Assessing ludic Designs in the field” international journal for human computer interaction by Gaver et al.

The Drift Table

A drift table is an electronic coffee table which displayed photographs controlled by the distribution of weights on its surface. It was based on the concept of achieving ludic engagement at home with the help of technology. the activities were motivated by curiosity, exploration and reflection rather than externally defined tasks.

The lecture by Paula was really interesting and made us curious about knowing more about the ludic engagement in different potential areas and sectors.

PDE 4210

In today’s session we had to work and get prepared for our visit to Gorilla kingdom in the London Zoo. The London Zoo authorities were noticing some abnormal behaviour in Gorillas. They had commissioned us to give them some advice on the major problem areas.

The IDEO method cards were our major start point to make a strategy before going for the field visit. Our framework was as follows

1. questionnaires

2. Rapid Ethnography, Guided tours

3. Analysis

4. Drawing or conceptualizing the experience

Week 6, 5th november 2007

CMT 4210

Today Bob gave a presentation at our Hendon campus at Interaction design centre. The presentation displays phidgets with different sensors , buttons, RIFD tags. It was quite an interesting presentation.

At the end he showed us The MERL DIAMOND TOUCH which was a touch sensitive surface attached to the computer. It was quite an interesting device and worked like Microsoft Surface.

Week 8, 19th november 2007

CMT 4210

No lectures this week.

PDE 4210

WE did the analysis of the information which we collected last week from the visit to london zoo…we had only one day work on the presentation for the recommendations we have to make based on our studies.