Every mobile app gives you something. It could be not only something tangible like the pair of jeans you've ordered using the app but also a piece of work like waking you up in the morning. It could be a feeling, for instance, a feeling of enjoyment obtained from watching a video clip or a feeling of closeness flashed out after receiving an old photo from a loving person via some instant messenger. That "something" is actually the reason why you use the app, it is the heart of the product, and in this course we will not talk about it. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. There are always two sides of a coin. There should be a person who makes that "something" accessible. It is astonishingly important because the use of the product loses its meaning if users can’t get what they want. The main objective of the course is to teach you to shape mobile products and services for people’s use. To do that, you’ll need to learn: - Interaction design activities and their place in the whole product design process - User research methods with a focus on the qualitative ones - Usability inspection and empirical usability evaluation methods - The process of design creation and best practices from interaction design, information architecture and visual design fields of study with a focus on the former Interfaces of handheld devices and tablets are in the spotlight. However, the processes and techniques covered by the course can be successfully applied to design interactions with mobile web apps and wearables. It should be noted that this course does not cover topics such as design management and mobile development, and it will as well not teach you how to use wireframing and prototyping tools. What makes the course unique is a focus on the way of thinking during a design process, the representation of a designer’s decisions in the form of design questions that make the continuous reflection on the design process possible and leads to the growth of the number of proposed design alternatives. The second unique thing about this course is a focus on the explanation of the concept of usability problems, and the processes of discovering and analysing them. Upon completion of the course, you will be able to: - Improve designs by eliminating different kinds of interaction problems - Design huge chunks of user interfaces in the case of adding a new feature to a product - Redesign a complete app by a given set of functions (e.g., extending an existing product to a new platform) The practical part of the course will require you to discover and eliminate interaction problems of a chosen mobile app. You will go through running guerrilla usability study, analysing gathered data, and making evidence-based design changes, which will enable you to create your first case study.
Context of Mobile Interactions, Part 1
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From the course by National Research University Higher School of Economics
Mobile Interaction Design: How to Design Usable Mobile Products and Services
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National Research University Higher School of Economics
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From the lesson
WEEK 1: Mobile Interaction Design: An introduction
The first week is introductory in nature. It examines the place of interaction design activities in the whole product design process as well as essential concepts such as usability and the context of use that you need to comprehend before proceeding to the next week. At the end of this week, you’ll also get acquainted with such thing as design-informing models and learn how to create personas that I recommend you to do while working on your practical task.
Meet the Instructors
Pavel ManakhovAssociate Professor
School of Software Engineering
Hello. I'm glad you are back.
In this lecture, we will discuss the concept of
context without mentioning any ways of studying it.
User research methods are the topic of the next and the following weeks.
You already know that context influences what the user considers as usable.
As a result, you understand that to design usable mobile products and services,
you need to be aware of the context in which the interaction takes place.
But what should you look for to learn about the context?
What do you need to focus on? Let's find out.
According to Anind Dey,
the context of use is
any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity.
An entity is a person, place,
or object that is considered relevant to
the interaction between a user and an application,
including the user and the application themselves.
I'd like to add to this definition that you shouldn't treat
context as a bunch of entities and their attributes.
Context has a dynamic nature.
An interaction is a part of a person's activity. An interaction is lasting in time.
With each moment of interaction,
different features of the world come into play.
Your goal is to understand how a particular entity
or its attribute is relevant to the particular moment of an interaction.
Knowledge of all this pairs,
I mean the moment of interaction plus a particular entity or its attribute,
is your understanding of context of use.
But how can you not drown in too much detail?
I want to introduce you to the vocabulary
of usage context by giving you the following example.
The task that was given to Sofia Korosteleva,
a student whom I was proud to co-supervise,
was to figure out how possible it would be to design
a parking app with superior usability
compared to the existing one developed by Eletronnaya Moscow.
Sofia started her research by studying
an existing technical infrastructure as a part of the Moscow parking service.
As in many cities around the globe,
the parking service in Moscow is prepaid.
It means that drivers should pay for parking in advance.
In opposite to parking meters,
newer ways to pay for parking like SMS-service and the Moscow Parking mobile app
allow to save the remainder of a payment
if the driver should leave the parking lot earlier than was planned.
Money is stored in a parking account associated with the mobile phone number.
Sofia found several problems or barriers.
One of them was the time it took to find parking meters on some streets of Moscow.
In general, barriers are anything that impedes user activity,
interrupts workflow or communications,
or interferes with the performance of work responsibilities.
It's important to look for barriers during your study because
overcoming barriers while designing an interaction is an opportunity to satisfy your users.
Not all barriers can be overcome solely by interaction design work on the "How" level.
For instance, I believe the mentioned barrier played a key role in
the whole service design process and gave
a boost to create alternatives to parking meters.
Sofia studied user behaviors.
It's necessary to not only study user activity as a whole,
but also to study the structure of the activity and its building blocks - tasks.
You should figure out how, when, where, why,
in which order and with whom users perform their tasks
because it gives you an understanding of actual ways of doing things
and it can also give you valuable insights to enhance interactions.
For instance, Sofia found out that users usually top
up the parking account right before the start of a parking session
(in opposite to topping up accounts in advance).
They make this decision on the basis of available money from the last parking session,
the price of the chosen parking lot and their prediction of the period of parking.
Using the existing Moscow Parking App,
a user does not only have to check out
prices in the different parts of the user interface,
but also make all these calculations in his or her head.
Why don't we provide him or her
with an available parking term or automatically to simplify the task?
It's also necessary to know some quantitative parameters of a user's activities.
Frequency and importance are two attributes of a task that allows you to prioritize them.
Unfortunately, Sofia hadn't done any quantitative research.
So this diagram illustrates her hypothetical distribution of user tasks.
Task priorities plays an important role in
interaction design because it gives you a basis to emphasize some tasks and hide others.
For instance, the most frequent and an important task
"Start a parking session" is available on the first screen of the Moscow Parking App.
The fastest way to park a car using
the Moscow parking app is to wait
for an automatic identification of the number of a parking area,
then press the "Pay" button, choose a car,
enter the number of parking hours, and then confirm the start of the parking session.
Sofia figured out that some users do not go this way.
They use the map to choose
a particular parking lot and then continue the task from the second step.
She found that the reason for their behavior was that users
do not trust the automatic identification of the number of a parking area.
Observing workarounds like this one and, what is much more available,
understanding the underlying causes,
allow you to enhance interactions.
In this case the possible solution may be providing a user with
more information about the automatically identified position on the first screen.
Ongoing research allowed Sofia to understand differences among users.
For example, professional drivers
whose employers pay for parking can use scratch cards to top up parking accounts.
This is an unusual payment method for drivers of their own cars.
They use different payment methods but does it mean that they are different?
Professional drivers are the same people
who may use the same app to pay for parking of their own cars.
We need to deal with it and provide a simple way to switch accounts for those who
use two or more sources of money, for example personal and business for payment.
There are a lot of attributes that a user inherently has like age,
language skills, or physical and intellectual abilities, etc.
It may seem that these do not relate to an interaction
but it is not always the case.
For instance, you need to know whether there are any chances
that your app will be used by people with visual disabilities.
As you may know there is a software embedded in Android and iOS operating system called
a screen reader that allows blind people and people with
low vision operate mobile devices with a touch screen.
In general, we're not interested in people's opinions,
but what we're really interested in is the underlying causes.
Look at the quote on this slide.
Why is it so important to the user to check out prices before a trip.
Underlying emotions may lead us to understand user goals.
For someone it's truly important to save money.
Look at the sketch on the left.
We can provide silent notifications about cheaper parking lots available nearby.
Someone wants to show his brand new car to his friends.
He is ready to wait for a while.
Look at the sketch on the right.
We can provide the user with the turnover rate of the particular parking lot.
The task is the same, but the goals are different.
Of course, an app is unable to predict users' goals,
but if you understand the motivations of your users,
you will be able to design interactions that are worthwhile.
To sum up the first part of this lecture, I'd
like to introduce you to the framework proposed by Nadav Savio.
It's presented on the slide.
Some of the elements we've already discussed in the parking app example,
some of them we will touch on in the next part of the lecture.
The framework provides you with the vocabulary of
usage context that can help guide your attention at the beginning of your study.
That is the greatest thing about this framework.
In this lecture we discussed the concept of context.
Context of use includes all relevant interaction features of the world.
It's dynamic in nature and thus requires us to understand
the relationship between the particular moment of
an interaction and relevant features of the world.
In order not to drown in too much detail, you need a framework like Nadav Savio's one, that can
serve as a lens to focus your attention at
the beginning of your study. See you in the next lecture.
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