Blogging UX Week - The Elements, Laws, and Characteristics of Interation Design
The Elements, Laws, and Characteristics of Interaction Design.
Another stellar PPT presentation that I heartily recommend downloading (PDF). This guy totally knows his stuff (which could be said about the other presenters, too). I’ll try to give the slide-by-slide recap and I’ll put the slide number in ().
- (3) Before you engage with a service you have to trust it.
- (4) Would you buy stuff from a pharmacy like this?
- (5) Would you trust these people with your money?
- (6) How something looks gives you a context and indications of how it should be used.
- (8) James Gibson and Don Norman created the idea of "affordance," which means how well a product lets you know what you can do with it.
- (9) Smart = Products that do things for human beings that they couldn’t otherwise do themselves.
- (10) Google’s processing power winnows down search results, overcoming our human data processing limitations.
- (11) We don’t have access to this raw data. Amazon crunches it for us.
- (15) George Miller - The human mind can only keep seven (plus or minus 2) items in memory.
- (17) When I do something with a product or service, I want to be acknowledged.
- (18) The Web 2.0 "Twirling, swirling thing" gives no indication of what’s happening. It makes the user wonder "what’s going on?" Something is, but you don’t know. Progress bars or other indicators that something’s going on make waiting seem like it takes less time.
- (19) All interactions take place over time: from nearly instantaneous to decades. Computer time is not equal to human time; the screen’s slowed down for you to use. We can manipulate time to make things better.
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(21) Delays in response can create frustration!
Anything under a half a second delay is probably OK.
> .5 seconds < 1 second - Users will think something is wrong
> 1 second < 10 seconds - Work is completely disrupted
> 10 seconds - put an indication that something is going on.
Remember: Even if your app takes 1.2 secons to load, you can still - and should! - provide feedback! -A -
(22) Feedback - "crooked voting" - do it early and often. Feedback should be a direct response to what’s happening, whether that’s an error or an affirmation.
Feedforward - Lets you know what’s going to happen before you do it.- What happens when you click a button that says "Click?" How about when that same button says "Create a blog?"
- Targets in anchor tags versus "click here."
- (25) The things we create must be appropriate for the cultures in which we create them.
- (26) This version of Yahoo! is set up for people in China; it’s appropriate for their use.
- (27) "Microcontexts" - The check in kiosk, of which we’re only occasional users, cannot be as complicated as MS Excel.
- (28) Texture tells us about context.
- (29) The objects’ distinct textures imply distinct contexts of use.
- (31) Sound can really annoy, bother, and distract people if it’s used incorrectly. Sounds is a good periphery-type of feedback. (Use sound as a background element).
- (33) Clever designing is anticipating things human beings will do with your device, then designing for it. It anticipates need then designs for that need.
- (34) Drawing highlights the huge pause button and 8-second rewinds button, both of which anticipate an expected use of the TiVO remote.
- (35) Ah, Clippy. It’s not clever because it anticipates needs you don’t have and tries to offer unrelated help you don’t need.
- (36) Poka-Yoke stems from Toyota’s QA. Poka-Yoke is idiot-proofing a product: essentially, you’re making sure accidents and problems don’t happen before they happen. You’re preventing a mistake from ever evening happening.
- (37) The USB plug anticipates an accident: it only fits in the proper slot so you can’t wedge it into the power socket.
- (38) (Larry) Tesler’s Law states that for every process, there is some amount of complexity that cannot be simplified. In digital process, there are some things you cannot leave out.. Good interaction design helps to relieve or reduce these complexities by assisting the user while the user works through them. In email, the necessaries are: to (which the mail client fills in), from (which the mail client offers assistance on), and that’s it. The client helps the user do the necessary work.
- (40) A Ludic design is "playful." It invites us to learn new things about it by playing and experimenting with it.
- (43) The Ameritrade app is designed to be playful. You can play around with and learn the app by playing with owning stocks until you’re comfortable enough with the app that you start to use real money and real purchases.
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(44) For digital objects we can either:
- Directly interact with them (and providing more direct ways for interaction is a good practice,
- Or, indrirectly manipluate them (with something like Select All).
Direct manipulation is far more intuitive: if you click it and it changes, you understand why the change occurred: you did it, it was out in the open.
- (46) For things to interact, they must move. Think of a videogame: you get engrossed because it’s moving, it pulls you in, and, suddenly, you’re moving with it.
- (47) How the cursor moves, how the dropdown opens, and how fast the folder opens all influence our feelings and emotions when we’re using a product or service.
- (49) All things move through space.
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(52) Fitts’ Law: The time it takes to reach a target is determined by the size of the target and the distance to the
target (really simplified translation: it’s easier and faster to click a big button that’s close to the end of a
form). -
(53) To design with Fitts’ Law in mind: keep buttons close; move navs to the top of screen.
"Star menus" (like that rater on amazon) are
easier and faster to use than dropdown menus, because the clickable elements are so close
together. -
(54) A pleasurable design is a design in which function and aesthetics are close together and
blend into each other.
