Interaction design info

It allows you to do what you want:

• Easily
• Quickly
• Correctly

Without getting in the way, supporting a natural and engaging interaction between users and products.

The consequences of poor interaction design:

• May take longer to do things
• May be so frustrating that one might give up all together.
• Interactive technology that is difficult to understand and use may also require more training.
• May result in costly mistakes
• May result in financial losses for companies that use interactive technology during the production of goods. 

A conceptual model is a high-level description of how a system is organized and operates. It describes what people can do with a system and what concepts they need to understand how to operate it. 

Benefits of conceptualising a design are:

• Design teams are encouraged not to become too focused early on and avoid being committed to particular implementations.
• Encourages design teams to establish a set of common terms that everyone can understand and agree upon, thereby reducing the chance of misunderstanding and avoiding confusion later on.
• Encourages design teams to clarify priorities. 

A scenario is a form of task description.

It is a short, imaginary story which is useful for exploring and representing situations that currently arise and, by implication, the requirements for the new interactive product.

The best way of presenting evaluation results will depend on how the data has been analysed, and to whom the results are being presented. 

If results are being presented to the development team, a video recording of edited highlights demonstrating the difficulties that participants had during the evaluation can be a powerful way to communicate the difficulties.

Most usability tests involve only a small number of participants, tabulations, charts and rankings that provide a visual representation of your data may be sufficient. 

Descriptive statistics like mean, median adn mode can be useful if applied appropriately. Similarly, simple correlations can be shown statistically.

Data interpretation in evaluation is the process of actively considering what caused the problems that have been identified, and what to do about them - that is, the implications of the evaluation data and findings for the design of the interactive product.

There are three steps to interpretation:

1. Finding causes for the usability problems that have been identified during analysis and rating the seriousness of each.

2. Prioritising issues.

3. Proposing changes to the design or making other reccomendations to address these problems.