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Week 1: Lesson 1
Introduction

[Human Computer Interaction]

• Demonstrate an understanding of the breadth of designing
interactive systems.

 This class will be an engaging class where we investigate applicable cases and
engage in activities, quizzes, and questions for discussion.
 What will be covered
in today’s lesson?
Evaluate the concepts underlying the
design of interactive systems.

Week 1 Explain why being human-centred is

Lesson 1 important in design.

Examine the historical background to

the subject.

Identify the skills and knowledge that

the designer of interactive systems
needs to draw upon.
Human Computer Interaction

The Variety of UX

 UX is concerned with many different types of interactive services and products.

 It is about designing web services that will run on a computer at work. It is about
designing apps, games, and interactive products such as home control systems,
digital cameras and applications for tablet devices like the iPad.

 It is about designing whole environments, such as new retail spaces, in which

phones, tablets, laptop computers, digital projectors and other devices and
services communicate with each other and through which people interact.

 It is about designing user experience, products and services for the home, work,
or supporting communities.
Examples of Products, Services, Systems
Example 1: In 2007, Apple Inc. changed the face of mobile technologies by introducing the
iPhone. The iPhone was beautifully made and had a carefully crafted, purpose-designed
interface to make use of the finger as the input device. It had a revolutionary touch-sensitive
screen that allowed for multi-touch input.

This facilitated new interaction techniques such as pinching an image and drawing it in to
make it smaller, or pinching and moving the fingers out to make an image larger. Many
mobile devices and larger screen systems have adopted this technology, but the iPhone
started it.

Example 2: A ‘smart thermostat’ to control central heating in people’s houses was

developed by Nest in 2014. The device has an elegant appearance.

It has a simple user interface for setting the temperature and rotating a dial on the outside of
the device. It communicates through a proprietary communications protocol called Heat Link
with the boiler to turn it on and off. It is also linked to the home’s Wi-Fi system.
Examples of Products, Services, Systems
Example 3: Burberry is an up-market brand of clothing manufacturer and retailer. Its flagship
store in Regent Street, London provides an enriched and interactive experience for
customers; ‘blurring the digital and physical worlds’.

Technology has been integrated throughout the architecture of the building, including
wireless communications, stereo speakers, large display screens and interactive products.
Customers can watch fashion shows and interact with brand content. Radio-frequency
identification (RFID) is woven into some clothing and accessories, triggering bespoke user
experiences that can be consumed on in-store screens or the customer’s smartphone or
tablet. There are mirrors that can turn instantly into screens so that customers can see what
they would look like in a particular garment without trying it on.

Example 5: Facebook (Figure 1.6) is a highly popular website that allows people to keep in
contact with their friends. Known as social networking sites, or social media, there are many
similar systems around. Facebook is the most popular, with more than 1 billion users
worldwide. Facebook is increasingly becoming a significant platform for various activities,
allowing people to add applications (apps) similar to the Apple and Android platforms.
HCI

The Concerns of UX
 UX design covers a wide range of activities. Sometimes designers will be working
on both the hardware and the software for a system, in this case, the term ‘product
design’ seems most appropriate to describe what they are doing.

 Sometimes, the designer will produce software to run on a computer on a

programmable device or over the internet.

 The terms ‘system design’ or ‘designing user experience’ seem more appropriate
in these cases. Sometimes the designer will be working on providing a connected
group of available facilities over several devices, in which case service design is
most appropriate.
HCI

The Concerns of UX
The key concerns of the UX designer may be summed up as:

 Design. What is design, and how should you do it?

 Technologies. These are the interactive systems, products, devices and

components themselves. The UX designer needs to know about technologies.

 People. The UX designer must consider who will use the systems and services
and whose lives they want to improve through their designs.

 Activities and contexts. UX is about what people want to do, about their goals,
feelings and achievements. UX needs to consider the contexts within which those
activities take place.
 Design
▪ The term ‘design’ refers both to the creative process of specifying something new and to the
representations that are produced during the process.

▪ For example, to design a website, a designer will produce and evaluate various designs, such as a design
of the page layout, a design of the colour scheme, a design of the graphics and a design of the overall
structure.
▪ Design is rarely a straightforward process and typically involves much iteration and exploration of both
requirements (what the system is meant to do and the qualities it should have) and design solutions.

One thing that is useful is to distinguish the amount of formality associated with a design:
 At one end of the spectrum is engineering design (such as the design of a bridge, a car or a building),
where scientific principles and technical specifications are employed to produce formal models before
construction starts.

 At the other end of this spectrum is creative or artistic design, where innovation, imagination and
conceptual ideas are the key ingredients.

9 Somewhere in the middle lies ‘design as craft’, which draws upon engineering and creative approaches.
 People and Technologies
 Interactive system is the term we use to describe the technologies that UX designers work with. This term
is intended to cover components, devices, products, services and software systems primarily concerned
with interactively processing information content.

 ‘Content’ is the term often used for this and includes all ways of presenting information,
including text, graphics, video, audio, 2D animation, and 3D animation in all the various formats and high,
medium or low definition.

 Interactive systems and services deal with transmitting, displaying, storing or transforming content that
people can perceive. They are devices and systems that respond dynamically to people’s actions.

 A fundamental challenge for UX is to deal with the fact that people and interactive systems are different.

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 Interface
▪ The interface to an interactive system or service, also called the user interface (UI), is all those parts of the
system with which people come into contact, physically, perceptually and conceptually:

 Physically, we might interact with a device by pressing buttons or moving a finger over a touch-sensitive
screen. The interactive device might respond by providing feedback through the pressure of the button or
changing a display in response to a swipe.

 Perceptually, the device displays things on a screen that we can see, makes noises we can hear, or
behaves in a way we can feel.

 Conceptually, we interact with a device by trying to work out what it does and what we should be doing.
The device provides messages and other content designed to help us do this.

▪ The interface needs to provide some mechanisms so that people can give instructions and enter data into
the system: ‘input’. It also needs to provide mechanisms for the system to tell people what is happening by
offering feedback and mechanisms for displaying the content: ‘output’. This content might be in the form of
information, pictures, movies, animations and so on. The interface may enable connectivity between
devices and services provided by an environment like the Internet.
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 Being Human-centered
UX is ultimately about creating interactive experiences for people. Being human-centred is
about putting people first; it is about designing user experiences to support people and for
people to enjoy. Being human-centred is about:

 Thinking about what people want to do rather than what the technology can do

 Designing new ways to connect people with people

 Involving people in the design process

 Designing for diversity.

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 The Skills of the UX Designer
▪ Study and understand the activities, goals and aspirations of people and the contexts
within which some technology might prove useful and hence generate requirements for
technologies (sometimes called ‘user research’).

▪ Know the possibilities offered by technologies

▪ Create technological solutions that fit in with people, the activities they want to undertake
and the contexts in which those activities occur (sometimes called ‘ideation’)

▪ Evaluate alternative designs and iterate (do more research and more design) until a
solution is arrived at.

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 Why being Human Centered is Important
▪ Being human-centred in design is expensive. It involves observing people, talking to them
and trying out ideas, which takes time.
▪ Being human-centred is an additional cost to any project, so businesses rightly ask
whether taking so much time to talk to people, produce prototype designs and so on is
worthwhile. The answer is a fundamental ‘yes’.

1. Return on Investment: Paying attention to people’s needs, the product’s usability, to the
overall UX results in reduced calls to customer helplines, fewer training materials,
increased throughput, increased sales and so on. Involving people closely in their
systems’ design will help ensure acceptability.

2. Safety: In the early 1980s, there was an accident at a nuclear power plant at Three Mile
Island in the USA that almost resulted in a meltdown. Reportedly one of the problems
was that the control panel indicated that a valve was closed when it was, in fact, open,
and another indicator was obscured by a tag attached to another control: two
fundamental design errors – one technical and one organizational – that human-centred
16 design techniques would help to avoid.
3. Ethics: Being human-centred also ensures that designers are truthful and open in their
design practice. Now that it is so easy to collect and use data for purposes other than
what it was intended for, designers need to be ever more vigilant.

As systems are increasingly able to connect autonomously with one another and share data,
people must know where the data they give is going and how it might be used. People need
to trust systems and be able to make choices about privacy and how they are represented.

4. Sustainability: Interactive systems have a big impact on the world, and designers
should approach interaction design from the perspective of what is sustainable.

Millions of mobile phones and other devices are thrown away each year, containing metals
potentially dangerous to the environment. Large displays and projectors gobble up power.
▪

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 PACT: A Framework for Designing UX
▪ People use technologies to undertake activities in contexts. For example, teenagers use
smartphones to text their friends on a bus. Secretaries use Microsoft Word to write
documents in a firm of solicitors.
▪ In all these settings, we see people using technologies to undertake activities in contexts,
and it is the variety of each of these elements makes designing UX such a difficult and
fascinating challenge.
▪ Technologies support various people undertaking various activities in different contexts.
▪ If the technology is changed (and remember that technologies include communications
and content as well as hardware and software), then the activities’ nature will also
change.

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People
There can be few less controversial observations than that people differ from one another in
various ways. Here we summarise some of the most important features.

 PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES: People differ in physical characteristics such as height and

weight. Variability in the five senses – sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste – has a huge
effect on how accessible, how usable and how enjoyable using technology will be for
people in different contexts.

For example, colour blindness (usually the inability to distinguish correctly between red and
green colours) affects about 8 per cent of Western males; short-sightedness and long-
sightedness affect many, and many people are hearing-impaired.

In Europe, there are 2.8 million wheelchair users, so designers must consider where
technologies are placed, and many people have dexterity impairments involving using their
fingers.
People
 PSYCHOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES: Psychologically, people differ in a variety of ways.

For example, people with good spatial ability find it much easier to find their way around and
remember a website than those with poor spatial ability. Designers should provide good
signage and clear directions for people with poor spatial ability.

Language differences are crucial to understanding, and cultural differences affect how people
interpret things. For example, the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet application has two buttons, one
labelled with a cross and the other with a tick. In the USA, a tick is used for acceptance and a
cross for rejection, but in Britain, either a tick or a cross can be used to show acceptance (e.g.
a cross on a voting paper).

 SOCIAL DIFFERENCES: People use systems, products and services for different reasons.
They have different goals in using systems. They have different motivations for using
systems.

Some people will be very interested in a particular system; others just want to complete a
simple task. These motivations change at different times.

Novice and expert users of the technology will typically have very different levels of knowledge
and hence requirements for design features.
People
 ATTITUDINAL DIFFERENCES: People also differ in the things they think are important
and in their ideological stance on issues. People may take a sense of pride in owning a
particular product.

They may use a service that helps them achieve personal goals, such as keeping fit and
healthy. Others may be more concerned with larger issues such as global warming.

People have different views on whether something should be taken seriously or not, and this
may affect how they react to the aesthetic design of a product or service.
Activities
There are many characteristics of activities that designers need to consider. The term is used for very simple
tasks and highly complex, lengthy activities, so designers must be careful when considering the characteristics
of activities. Below is our list of the 10 important characteristics of activities that designers need to consider.
First and foremost, the designer should focus on the activity’s overall purpose. After that, the main features
are:

• Temporal aspects (items 1–4)

Cooperation (5)
Complexity (6)
Safety-critical (7 and 8)
The nature of the content (9 and 10)

1. Temporal aspects cover how regular or infrequent activities are. Something undertaken every day
can have a very different design from something that happens only once a year. People will soon
learn how to make calls using a mobile phone but may have great difficulties when it comes to
changing the battery.

2. Other important activities features include time pressures and peaks and troughs of working. A
design that works well when things are quiet can be awful when things are busy.

3. Some activities will occur as a continuous set of actions, whereas others are more likely to be
interrupted. If people are interrupted when undertaking some activity, the design must ensure they
can ‘find their place’ again and pick up. It is important to ensure that people do not make mistakes
Activities
4. The response time required from the system must be considered. If a website takes two minutes to
deliver a response when the server is busy, that may be frustrating for a normal query.

5. Another important feature of activities is whether they can be carried out alone or whether they are
essentially concerned with working with others.

6. Well-defined tasks need different designs from more vague tasks. If a task or activity is well-defined, it
can be accomplished with a simple step-by-step design. A vague activity means that people have to be
able to browse around, see different types of information, move from one thing to another and so on.

7. Some activities are ‘safety-critical’, in which any mistake could result in an injury or a serious accident.
Others are less so. Where safety is involved, designers must ensure that mistakes do not have a serious
effect.

8. In general, it is vital for designers to think about what happens when people make mistakes and errors
and to design for such circumstances.

9. It is also important to consider the data requirements of the activity. Suppose large amounts of alphabetic
data must be input as part of the activity (recording names and addresses, perhaps, or word-processing
documents). In that case, a keyboard is almost certainly needed. In other activities, there may be a need
to display video or high-quality colour graphic displays.

10. Just as important as data is the media that an activity requires. A simple two-tone display of numeric data
demands a very different design from a full-motion multimedia display.
Context
 Activities always happen in a context, so analysing the two together is necessary. Three
useful types of context are distinguishable: the organisational context, the social context and
the physical circumstances under which the activity takes place. Context can be a difficult
term.

 For an activity such as ‘withdraw cash from an ATM’, for example, an analysis of context
would include things such as the location of the device (often as a ‘hole-in-thewall’), the
effect of sunshine on the readability of the display, and security considerations. Social
considerations would include the time spent on a transaction or the need.
to queue.

 PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT: The physical environment in which an activity happens is

important. For example, the sun shining on an ATM display may make it unreadable. The
environment may be noisy, cold, wet or dirty.

The same activity – for example, logging on to a website – may be carried out in geographically
remote environments where internet access is slow or with all the facilities of a large city and
fast networks.
Context
 SOCIAL CONTEXT: The social context within which the activity occurs is also important. A
supportive environment will offer plenty of help for the activity. Training manuals may be
available, tuition or experts to hand if people get into trouble.

There may be privacy issues to consider, and an interaction can be very different if the person
is alone compared to being with others. For example, the use of sound output is often
unacceptable in an open-plan office environment but might be quite effective where a person is
working alone.

 ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT: The organisational context is important as technological

changes often alter communication and power structures and may affect jobs, such as
deskilling.

Many books are devoted to studying organizations and the impact of new technologies on
organisations. We cannot do justice to this subject here. The circumstances under which
activities happen (time, place and so on) also vary widely and must be considered.
Technologies
People using such systems engage in interactions, and physical devices have various degrees
of style and aesthetics. Designers of UX need to understand the materials they work with, just
as designers in other areas, such as interior design, jewellery design, etc., have to do.

Designers must be aware of various input, output, communication and content possibilities.

 INPUT: Input devices are concerned with how people enter data and instructions into a
system securely and safely. Switches and buttons facilitate a simple and direct method of
issuing instructions (such as ‘turn on’ or ‘turn off’), but they take up space.

On small mobile devices, there is not enough room to have many buttons, so designers have to
be careful which functions have their buttons.

On the iPhone, for example, a button on the side of the device is allocated to turn the sound off
and on. The designers decided this was such an important and often-used function that it
should have its own button.
Technologies
 OUTPUT: Technologies for displaying content to people rely primarily on the three
perceptual abilities of vision, hearing and touch. The most fundamental output device is the
screen or monitor.

 COMMUNICATION: Communications between people and between devices are an

important part of UX design. Here, issues such as bandwidth and speed are critical. So too,
is feedback to people so they know what is happening and, indeed, something is happening!

In some domains, the transmission and storage of large data becomes a key feature.
Communication can occur through wired connections such as a telephone line or an Ethernet
network often found in offices.

 CONTENTS: Content concerns the data in the system and the form it takes. Content
considerations are a key part of understanding the characteristics of the activities as
described above. The content that technology can support is also critical.

Good content is accurate, up-to-date, relevant and well-presented.

 Scoping a Problem with PACT
 Designers want to get the right mix of technologies to support the activities being
undertaken by people in different contexts.

 A PACT analysis is useful for both analysis and design activities: understanding the
current situation, seeing where possible improvements can be made or envisioning future
situations.

 To conduct a PACT analysis, the designer scopes out the variety of Ps, As, Cs and Ts that
are possible or likely in a domain.

 This can be done using brainstorming and other envisionment techniques and by working
with people through observations, interviews and workshops.

 A PACT analysis is also useful for developing personas and scenarios. The designer
should look for trade-offs between PACT combinations and consider how these might
28 affect design.
 THANK
YOU

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