Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Good Ideas from Preece, Rogers and Sharp

Graduate students were asked to discuss the first chapter, "What is Interaction Design?" in groups and to identify 2 - 3 key ideas.

1. Usability goals (behavioral) and user experience goals (reflective) are different.
2. Trying to achieve a usability goal may impact an experience goal -- there are trade-offs.
3. Good system design supports users in accomplishing tasks SAFELY -- mistakes are low-cost, are reversible, rather than costing you valuable data, processes, time.
4. Continuously divided attention -- an important design consideration (precious and limited cognitive resources).
5. Telephones are an emotional tool, but the appliance is not. How do we get people to fall in love with our product?
6. Design principles - like the do's and the don'ts, can follow them in the design process - makes a design more "error proof". Like, Visibility, feedback, constraints, mapping -- they all guide us.
7. Usability principles - lots of overlap, designers need to select which ones are most relevant to their particular design.
8. Mapping and fidelity - designers of simulations talk about levels of fidelity.
9. Transparency & consistency - so users encounter the same instructions, and can have the same expectations in different parts of the system.
10. Working together in multidisciplinary team - diversity can be a strength, and even an necessity, but it can take longer to develop a shared language and shared understanding of concepts - "what one person values, other people may not even see"

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