Wyrwane z kontekstu – Practical Interaction Design

The three key foundations of Practical Interaction Design are:

1. The initial design based on the  twin elements of the designer’s familiarity with the world and technology and the client’s brief. The brief may be as loosely defined as ‘a new application for the iPhone’ (the coursework in the first delivery of the PID module) or a tightly specified set of requirements. The designer’s task is to understand what is wanted, using their own familiarity with the world and the technology it comprises. The world is both filled with and defined by technology: technology with which we have been familiar from our earliest moments. Our familiarity with interactive technology facilitates our ability to cope with it, and in coping with it we modify and improve our familiarity with it. Students draw on their familiarity with interactive technology to make sense of the brief and to ground that understanding in what technology can do. This phase of PID culminates in the generation of initial ideas. Familiarity with the technology and setting of a specific design project is also expected to be extended and enhanced through the use of ethnography.
2. The profile of the people being designed for, expressed as personae. Having established an initial understanding of what is to be designed it is only now that who is being designed for is brought into consideration. Personae are introduced as lively, realistic, embodiments of target  users. Established HCI ‘user’ research techniques and the tools of design ethnography are taught as supporting activities for persona development. As students gather data and define personae for their emerging design they are supported in the identification of design implications and consequent modifications. The project, however, remains designled rather than user-driven.
3. Based on (1) and (2), the development of a very early prototype. Turning initial ideas into something tangible is the pivotal step.  The sooner the designer commits  to paper or software the sooner can the process of iterative  refinement begin. In PID students start with paper prototypes and move on to embody their designs as simple software applications.  Crucially, design features are not defined in response to ‘user needs’ or ‘tasks’ but as affordances  offered to those who will interact with the artefact. If we think about interaction as identifying and exploiting affordances, what follows is a game-like, exploratory approach which is closer to the aims of interaction design. The process is not only playfulin its repetitive nature, as observed above, but also in its oscillation between the security of the familiar and the risk of the new. This is the very essence  of earliest childhood games, as explored in Freud’s classic account and persists through much adult play.

Źródło:  Practical Interaction Design, Phil Turner and Susan Turner, Interfaces 79/2009