Interaction Design

MMME4057
Human-Computer Systems
Dr Cath Harvey
Catherine.harvey@nottingham.ac.uk
Week 5:
Interaction Design
Lecture Overview
 Design principles (David Benyon)

 Psychological principles
3
Context and the HCD Cycle
Starting to design:
 Understand the data you
have collected
 Interviews
 Literature, standards
 Group discussion
…
 Empathise
 Develop a picture of what
the UX should be
4
Design Principles
Access, Ease of Learning and Remembering (1)
1. Visibility
 What functions are available?
 What is the system doing?
 Are text, images and icons readable and understandable?
https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/06/17/colour-contrast-why-does-it-matter/
6
2. Consistency
 Within a single system AND with similar systems
 How things look (physical consistency) and how things are done (conceptual
consistency)
3. Familiarity
 Language, icons, symbols, images
 Think about using metaphors to aid learning
8
4. Affordances
 The properties of a thing (or perceived properties) and how these relate to how the
thing can be used
 Buttons afford pressing
 Chairs afford sitting
 Culture and experience influence affordances

? 9
Ease of Use (1)
5. Navigation
 How does the user know how to move around a system?
 How does the user know where they are?
10
Ease of Use (2)
6. Control
 How does the user know who or what is in control?
 Allow users to take control and know that this is happening
Mode confusion? See: Wilson, et al. (2020) Driver trust and mode confusion in an on-road study of level-2
automated vehicle technology. Safety Science, 130: 104845. 11
Ease of Use (3)
7. Feedback
 How does the user know what
effect their actions have had?
 Multisensory feedback often
more effective than single
modality
Accurate feedback is better, but is not always achieved, e.g. the progress bar:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/how-to/a7417/why-the-progress-bar-is-lying-to-you / 12
Safety and Effectiveness
8. Recovery
 Can the user recover quickly from errors?
9. Constraints
 Can we prevent users from making errors?
 Icons are greyed out when not available
 Seeking confirmation for an action can constrain
potentially incorrect operations
13
Accommodating and Respecting Differences (1)
10. Flexibility
 Are there multiple ways of doing things?
 Can users personalise the interaction?
How do you feel about increasing

personalisation?
What are the costs?
 Movement from ‘adaptable’ (can be changed by the user) to ‘adaptive’ (system

‘intelligently’ adapts to the user)
14
11. Style
 How do aesthetics impact on UX?
 Do users tolerate lower usability if a product is aesthetically pleasing?
 ‘Aesthetic-Usability effect’
= tendency to perceive more attractive products as more usable
15
12. Conviviality
 ‘Interactive systems should be polite, friendly and generally pleasant’ (Benyon, 2019)
 What about conviviality of users to products?
 e.g. speaking politely to your smart speaker
 Also think about supporting social interactions…
16
Psychological Principles
Multimodality and Multisensory Interactions
Think about speaking at the same time as using body

language, gestures, facial movements, etc.
Wickens’ ‘Multiple Resources Model’

Timesharing will be more effective for tasks which use
different levels along the dimensions
18
Mental Models
Designer’s Conceptual
Model of Product
‘an outline of what people can Evidence, experience,

do with a product and what feedback, knowledge,
concepts are needed to
understand how to interact Match learning, etc.
with it’(Preece et al., 2015)
User’s Mental Model

of product
20
Memory
 Designing for memory
 Don’t expect people to remember lots of detail
 ‘Chunking’ of meaningful elements of a task into one place (See Miller’s ‘Magical number 7’)
 Avoid information overload (Hick’s Law)
 Recognition rather than recall
21
Attention
 Attention and time
 Selective attention, alternating attention, sustained attention
 Persistence of information to ensure reading, recognition, understanding
 User-pacing or machine-pacing?
 Progress indicators
 Interruptions and distractions
 Important when an interaction is NOT the primary task
 E.g. e-Scooter GPS device
Pannafino (2018) Interaction design - www.interactiondesignbook.com 22

Sense-Making
Prediction
 Anticipating what the system will do, based upon familiarity with similar systems
 Knowing what the system will do, based upon experience and training
Feedback
 Humans use feedback from a system to regulate further behaviour
 Used to confirm / reinforce correct model
 Used to correct / avoid incorrect model
Repair (Behaviour change)
 Alarms – intervention is required
 Warnings / advice – something has happened that cannot be interpreted by the system or may
have unwanted consequences
23
Perceptual Guidelines (Gestalt Laws)
Many overlapping principles, including:
 Proximity
 Objects appearing close together in space or time tend to be perceived together
 Similarity
 Similar elements appear to be related
 Similarity may be through shape, colour,
size, etc.
 Continuation
 The human eye follows paths and lines
 Can use cues to indicate continuation
24
Summary
Summary
 Started to think about how to design based on psychological and

design principles
 Covered some examples, but not an exhaustive list
 You should be able to recognise some of the interaction design
principles in products/systems that you interact with
 Are they implemented successfully or not?
26
Questions to ask in
groups:
What interaction styles are most appropriate for our application?

How can we consider psychological principles in our design?

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MMME4057

 Design principles (David Benyon)

 Culture and experience influence affordances

How do you feel about increasing

 Movement from ‘adaptable’ (can be changed by the user) to ‘adaptive’ (system

Think about speaking at the same time as using body

Wickens’ ‘Multiple Resources Model’

‘an outline of what people can Evidence, experience,

User’s Mental Model

Pannafino (2018) Interaction design - www.interactiondesignbook.com 22

 Started to think about how to design based on psychological and

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