The Process of Interaction Design

In my last blog, I was talking about Chapter 7 my Interaction Design textbook which covered the different methods of data gathering. The next three chapters dealt with data analysis, the process of interaction design, and identifying requirements.

In data gathering, data can be broken down into two different categories, qualitative and quantitative. Both types of data can be analyzed differently. Researchers try to find patterns and trends to support their theories and findings. Graphical representation of data helps in identifying patterns easily in quantitative data. Grounded theory, activity theory, and distributed cognition was used by the author of the textbook to analyze qualitative data. These frameworks work by breaking down the qualitative data into smaller and smaller categories so that they can find the trend or patterns at the refined categories.

The next chapter focused on the early stages of interaction design. The planning of interaction design from identifying the needs all the way to implementing the requirements. This chapter emphasized on catering to the user. As a developer, I believe that it's important to base my work upon the user's requirements and request rather than trying to do it my way. This ensures that the user will be happy with the final product. Involving the user during the process is also key to achieving better product. Letting the user play with the prototype let's the designer know what works and what needs to be refined. Different lifecycle models were also explained in this chapter. In my experience, we used Agile development in my software engineering class. Agile development focused on collaboration and that is exactly how we developed for my previous course. Letting you peers do constructive criticism of your code helps you develop and mature as a developer.

Chapter 10 was pretty simple. It uses the previous lectures from data gathering and analysis to identify and establish requirements. Nothing much to talk about since it just talked about how to apply the previous methods.

Next time I hope to find a journal from the ACM library that interests me. I'm currently looking at the latest journals that relates to Android.